Motivation
I now think I inadvertently conceded a little too much in that last post. Through not paying quite enough attention to the first part of Chris’ comment – the ‘at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern’ part. My attention was grabbed by the parenthesis, by ‘motivation,’ because motivation is exactly what I had it in mind to talk about. I do think religion can be a powerful motivator, for both good and ill. But that symbolic articulation I take to be a separate question, and that one I’m much more doubtful about. I for one simply don’t find its articulations all that impressive, or at least no more so (at best) than secular articulations. There’s a bit of Isaiah I love with a passion – the one about the lion and the kid lying down together – but it expresses a thought that a secularist could (and does) easily have just as well. It’s probably a thought that humans have had as long as they’ve been human.
To put it another way – I’m not sure it really is the ‘symbolic articulation’ that does the motivating. That’s why I take the two to be separate. I think the motivation actually comes from somewhere else. From the tangle of idealization, fantasy, imagination and so on that makes up the deity. That’s pretty much the point of a deity, after all. To provide a focus for all those longings and imaginings, to make up for all the terrible lacks of human beings, to be anything and everything we want, desire, need, long for. We need it and miss it and want it; we imagine and conjure it up; we love it. Of course we love it – what’s not to love? What are we going to imagine, a crappy tiresome inadequate deity that’s just as imperfect and frustrating as real people are? As boring, or bad-tempered, or lazy, or more interested in self than in us, as real people are? What would we do that for? What would be the point of that? No, our deity is like all the nicest things in the people we like and entirely without all the nasty bits. That’s the motivator, surely. (That doesn’t describe the all-too-human Greek deities, or the god of wrath, to be sure, but the effect is the same. Either extreme love or extreme fear: both gut-level motivators.)
Religious morality is not particularly original, and a lot of it is disgusting. Even Jesus, that we’re encouraged to think is all about love thine enemy and turn the other cheek and little else, is made to say some appalling things by the writers of the gospels, especially John. It always horrifies me to read of, say, Muslim feminists explaining that the Koran does not in fact require female genital mutilation or the hijab or whatever other piece of female subordination is being discussed. Good, glad to hear it, but what if it did? Would you then bow your head and submit? Or would you find a better way to decide your morality.
Either the morality is good, in which case the deity is surplus to requirements, or it isn’t, in which case the deity is one we should reject. But…the point about thin gruel remains. It’s hard to think of a substitute for religion as a motivator. Literature, as with Arnold and Leavis? Rock concerts? Football? Sometimes political movements can do it. The Civil Rights movement in the US was like that, and the struggle against apartheid. Which prompts baffled thoughts about the fact that we get inspired to be our best, dedicated, self-sacrificing selves when there is a glaring injustice to be corrected…So does that mean it’s good that there should be glaring injustices? Hardly. And yet the inspiration is precisely bound up with the injustice. This is a familiar thought, but one that doesn’t get discussed much. But it’s well-known that veterans of the Civil Rights movement, like veterans of the Spanish Civil War, are nostalgic for the Cause and the ‘beloved community.’ We’re all like Don Quixote, wishing we had something noble to work for. Making a little more money isn’t quite it.
Norm Geras has a very interesting post that’s also on this overall subject. And I have a good deal to add. It’s like a hydra, all this. Every N&C suggests three or four more. Get comfortable; we may be here for awhile.
“Even Jesus, that we’re encouraged to think is all about love thine enemy and turn the other cheek and little else, is made to say some appalling things by the writers of the gospels, especially John.”
Indeed. I’m reading Simon Blacburn’s “Being Good” right now, which talks a bit about some of the dubious corners of Jesus’ ethics. Paul Kurtz has made a good sport of pointing out Jesus’ moral shortcomings, too, in books like “The Transcendental Temptation.”
It’s always amazing how many Christians are so quick to cite Jesus as a perfect moral example, while not seeming to understand anything about the concepts of either “perfection” or “morality.” Or maybe it’s not so surprising, since their ignorance about anything but their ingrained religious ideas is precisely what enables them to mouth such treacle in the first place.
Phil
Forgive me, Ophelia, but I think you’ve got it the wrong way round.
Assuming (as I think I can) that you do not think that Jesus was the Son of God and was passing on his Father’s views, then where did he get his moral precepts from?
Answer – surely – is as Norm Geras suggests, namely that they are the moral norms (sorry!) which human groups evolved as part of their move towards social cohesiveness;a process which John Rawls and others have examined so cogently.
So the secular stuff is the Campbell’s Soup, it’s the religious stuff that’s the gruel.
“they are the moral norms which human groups evolved as part of their move towards social cohesiveness;a process”
Indeed. Consider how the Code of Hammurabi precedes and influences the Old Testament. While not something that should be held up as exemplary today the code is nonetheless legal rather than religious per se.
Good lord, that was horribly formatted! Is there any way I can reconfigure the text box to do word wrap? Or do I just need to get a better browser?
Chris,
But didn’t I say that? I meant to. But perhaps I was unclear.
That was the whole point of the bit about separation.
The only part of Chris’ comment I’m actually agreeing with is the motivation part, not the symbolic aritculation part. I do think (reluctantly) he may have a point about the motivation. I tend to think irrational convictions, emotions, passion, etc are useful (often in a dangerous way) for motivation. Not to be good in general, perhaps, not to be good when it’s easy – but to go on being good when it’s difficult. To do the right thing even when you really don’t want to. I think Chris may be right that religion has an edge there. I don’t particularly want to think that, but it seems plausible.
“Hmmm. I’d say it should be the other way around. Why should we convince you? You are the one making the extraordinary claims. Shouldn’t it be the other way? “
Oops, I guess this would look better if we deleted that last sentence. No need to repeat myself…
Hi Andrew,
I redid your post by hand, but it took me awhile! If there is any way you can reconfigure the text box, I have no idea what it is.
Sociology of religion is one of the things I want to get to, at some point. Not to say much, because I don’t know much, but at least to acknowledge it. My colleague does know much, since he is a sociologist himself, and has told me a little about the Durkheimian view and so on. Therefore I can’t say much or he’ll correct me and publicly embarrass me. Not really; that’s a joke.
Welcome Andrew. What a relief that it came out right this time!
“But the fact remains that a huge number of people believe that their own morality, however inadequate, springs from their religious beliefs, or, more precisely, from the same source as the source of their religious beliefs.”
Yes, they do, but they’re often wrong about that, and can be shown as much. It is possible to explain to people that their morality in fact does have other sources and that they would continue to adhere to it even in the absence of the religious backup. Simply ask them to do a thought experiment, for example: imagine a message from the deity that said genocide was a good idea. Would that make you decide that it is? Or would you become afraid of the deity. Those who answer the latter way surely have other (better) sources for their morality.
The fact that glucose can be isolated from orange juice doesn’t mean that the effects of glucose on test subjects are the equivalent of eating an orange from a feral tree in a rain forest a half-mile from the nearest road, on Maui in 1968 after hiking from Science City through Haleakala Crater and down the Kaupo Gap.
Or, the delusional insistence on UFO abductions doesn’t preclude the existence of alien beings.
Or the fact that the life of Jesus was essentially castrated by the writers of teh Gospels, meaning there is nothing about his life from the onset of puberty to full manhood, and speaking as someone who was once a teenager thsoe years would have helped tremendously as a template for the socialization of sexual desire and beahvior. Instead what we have are the sexual mores of inferior men masked as Biblical injunction.
The perfection of Jesus is the perfection of the Nike of Samothrace, probable,possible, but unprovable because it’s not there, in total.
Lenny Bruce had a great rap on teh evolution of law, starting with the piling up of human waste, and the need to move it around and contain it and control where it was deposited.
The subjective nature of divine revelation neuters it entirely for the unrevealed-to. Testimony is at best good poetry. And the miracles that once swayed whole crowds are in the hands of magicians now.
“on an individual level, certain people’s lives are transformed, not so much by religious belief, but by what almost all of them interpret as an encounter with the divine in some sense. If that’s not what it is, then what is it? “
Well, what about all the people whose lives are transformed for the worse because of their alleged contact with the divine? The people who become absolutely convinced that they need to fly an airplane into a tall building in the name of Allah, for instance? Or who believe God wants them to bomb abortion clinics, kill prostitutes, or convince a group of people to commit mass suicide? Not only good things happen when people have these mystical experiences, and I’m sure you don’t want to claim that the ones with evil outcomes are genuine encounters with God.
Psychologically and neurologically, however, these experiences have commonalities. They are associated with similar areas of the brain, and have similar cognitive effects. How the experience itself is interpreted depends on a mixture of cultural and personal background beliefs. In other words, things look exactly as we would expect them to look if there were no divine reality behind them, but only cognitive/neurological events mediated by pre-existing beliefs.
Phil
Asking a Christian what he would do if God told him genocide was a good idea is like asking a scientist (and this actually happened to me) what he would do if rainbows began to be observed with the colors in a different order. The obvious answer in each case is “Reevaluate my beliefs.” but most Christians are as unconvinced that God would do this as physicists are that rainbows will ever appear scrambled. Of course, the Bible portrays God saying exactly that at times, but Biblical literalism is a relatively new entrant in the religion sweepstakes, and wrong ideas about the nature of light have gained currency at various times. Not surprising, as the true nature of light is surprisingly complex. Mediator of the electromagnetic force? Where did that come from?
The stone tablet/commandment idea is a fairly primitive model of the divine origin of personal morality, although its historical roots and analogy to authoritarian societies make it easy to understand why it still enjoys so much currency. Orthodox Christianity actually rejects that model, emphasizing instead a personal transformation process called “sanctification” guided by the Holy Spirit. I realize this sounds like gobbledygook, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this question gets any simpler by ruling out a priori actually existing hypotheses. As John Holbo posted on his weblog, things already get as complicated as they’re going to get once you move off nihilism.
Another response is that, according to Christians, even the bit of morality within peoples’ own consciences also comes from God whether they realize it or not. Personally, if I received such a message, I would be skeptical that it really came from God. Doesn’t sound like the guy I know.
You should understand that your argument would be spectacularly unconvincing. It is, if I’m not mistaken, a typically philosophical argument, attempting to generalize from a hypothetical, wildly idealized test case to general principles. I’m really not interested in the question of how my beliefs would be different if God were evil. If I ever find out he is, I’ll let you know.
The source of morality is a very interesting question whose answer is, I am sure, far more complex than the question of the nature of light. All the reductionist answers seem too facile. Everyone starts out good but gets corrupted by society! No wait, everyone’s character is predetermined by their genes! Oh, I know, people start out as blank slates and are programmed by their experiences! They all beg the question as surely as the God hypothesis does. If morality comes from society, where does society get it? If it comes from the genes, where do they get it? They all need to be tested. Divine morality needs to be put to the test, but there are still a lot of reasonable people left who think it’s passed whatever ones it’s been put to so far. That’s saying something, considering.
Okay, my last post was a response to Ophelia’s. Flying fast here!
> I am fairly pessimistic about the whole “project” (if there’s any). I do not think we will be able to get rid of religion in the near future, but that is not what worries me: what I am actually more concerned about is fundamentalism. I think you will probably agree with me that trying to convince fundamentalists would be a next to impossible task.
Depending on the flavor of fundamentalist, yes. This makes it worthwile to figure out which ones are susceptible to reason and which are not. Some in these comments don’t seem to think there is any such criterion; that all religious belief is just like fundamentalism. If that’s true, we’re in trouble. But it’s not; that’s what I’m here to tell you.
> “They have a self-consistent reason for caring what you believe, and you think they’re wrong. Convince them to leave you alone. “
> I disagree with your advice. Whatever happened to the parameters of rational dialogue in a world where you have to convince others that is your right to be left alone?
This happens all the time! You’ve never received spam? If you make it clear you are unconvinced, and they still won’t leave you alone, then they’re just being rude. But that’s pretty rare, and not confined to religious people.
>> ” I’m skeptical of the ability of rational argument to convince you, although it does at least seem to happen.”
> Are you claiming that you can base yourself exclusively on rational arguments to make a strong and coherent case for the existence of a deity? If the argument is purely rational, I would like to hear it.
I’m specifically disavowing that claim; it was made by one of the respondents here about a friend of his. That was my point about “underlying psychology”.
> “Just as religiosity is poorly correlated with personal morality, so is skeptical thinking, I’m afraid. “
> That still doesn’t answer the charge that basing the idea of morality on a deity is on shaky grounds.
Of course not. But if it’s a “charge” it needs to be backed up. And yes, I’m familiar with the examples, and they are legion.
I take seriously the naturalistic hypotheses for seemingly religious experiences and look forward to further research. I would like to understand why I, myself, hold the beliefs I do, much less anyone else. The field seems in its infancy and there’s a lot more work to be done.
My critique of philosophy is not that the answers it provides are not easy, but that they seem no better or more believable than those of religion. Philosophy is not a branch of science.
And the answers of Christianity are hardly easy. It’s got to be one of the most convoluted belief systems ever devised. One wonders why anyone would believe it…
I sympathize with msg’s point of view, but I think it’s clear that it’s not what we mean by rational discussion, and won’t be convincing to a religious person.
As for Phil’s point, it’s an assertion without an explanation. What is the point of this neural adaptation? Should we try to genetically engineer it out? If not, what do we do with it? And I’m sure you’re all aware that many religions posit the existence of both good and evil spirits.
I should emphasize the point that I’m really not interested in defending supernatural truth claims. Jose’ hit the problem on the head.
> Nonetheless, I would still argue that it eventually has to go, if only because I am convinced that in the long run believing in a falsity will not bring any durable advantage to humankind.
This seems to me like an article of faith. This is the assertion that I think needs to be tested. Is religion really harmful? If so, why? Answering that will help us figure out what to do.
Andrew, but I think you’re missing my point (I didn’t make it very clearly). It was just to clarify that we in fact already think genocide is wrong (those of us who do), without being told so by a deity. The deity is supererogatory to morality. People just assume that’s where it comes from, but if they examine it, they can (sometimes) realize that it doesn’t. The deity is used as backup and enforcement rather than source.
Andrew-
My faith is that the universe, the one thing all this is, is not flat, cold and pitiless void, but tipped toward the light. Maybe just one micronomical degree, but still.
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OB-
Can you claim the separate evolution of your repugnance at genocide? Weren’t your values formed in a culture whose laws morals and money were and are saturated with divinity?
And as before my version is – the genocide is there, has been all along, it’s just masked as dominance over savagery or other “bad” people. God says it’s ok, so it isn’t really genocide. Wounded Knee comes to mind.
The Nazis, had they succeeded in their inhuman work, would have written the history of that time just so, as necessary and inevitable, elliding the parts that would mean they weren’t entitled, were in fact no different than a swarm of termites or a mold.
I suspect Jose and Phil have already conveyed the gist of what I am likely to say here, but for the sake of completeness:
“I find less persuasive the argument that this necessarily means that all religious experiences are similarly devoid of meaning.”
That wasn’t exactly my point – which was simply that such experiences don’t fall within the ambit of anything I would describe as empirical (and that while I agree that argument is rarely a helpful basis for discussion of this kind, I’m not sure that invoking revelation helps much either). I certainly agree that such experiments (either using electromagnetism or chemnical replication) are far from precluding the authenticity or validity of such experiences (though I have to say that that is the direction I think it tends towards, in so far as it suggests a basis for mysticism and spiritual experience that doesn’t actually require a god).
“What if this sort of thing is what human societies need to function? Maybe your beef is with human nature itself.”
Possibly, but you are taken the concept of human nature as a given in a manner that I’m rather uneasy about (and I could be speculating inaccurately at this point, but I suspect the reason for that is that you are asking an agnostic to accept a view of human nature predicated on original sin). Particularly since the view of society you have outlined is one of continuous indoctrination and propaganda (i.e. the techniques of a fascist state), and the view of human nature (in so far as such a thing exists) an improbably monolithic one.
Incidentally, I’ve never been particularly sure why the Durkheimite argument is so popular amongst religious believers – all Durkheim requires is for people to believe in a god conducive to a form of moral order. He doesn’t actually require such an entity to exist.
“Adapt the bits that work to make the side effects more benign. As far as I know, the only secularists trying to do this are the Unitarian Universalist church, and they could use a little help.”
Like Jose, I have no difficulty with this, as it tends to be only the fundamentalist strains of religion that concern me. That said, my impression as an atheist is that religious attempts of that kind have lost ground to secularism on the one hand and evangelism on the other. Hence the decline of the methodist church, for example.
“But the fact remains that a huge number of people believe that their own morality, however inadequate, springs from their religious beliefs”
The fact does indeed remain. But as I’ve long felt that christian (or monotheist generally) morality was nothing of the kind, that fact does little to reassure me.
“I should point out that in my opinion, however bad religion is at inducing moral behavior, as far as I can tell, philosophy is far, far worse.”
Like Jose, I’m not sure this is a fair comparison. Most philosophers do not write with that object in view. Similarly, secularists aren’t necessarily interested in displacing religion.
“As for Phil’s point, it’s an assertion without an explanation. What is the point of this neural adaptation? Should we try to genetically engineer it out? If not, what do we do with it? And I’m sure you’re all aware that many religions posit the existence of both good and evil spirits.”
Is it, though, Andrew? Or is the statement that every physiological phenomena must have a “point,” let alone a theological purpose, an assertion without an explanation?
I think you indicated that you’ve read Gould, so you should know that not everything shaped by evolution is necessarily purposive or adaptive. Some features of organisms are simply by-products of features actually acted upon by natural selection. And since bodies have particular structures, the bodies also malfunction in particular ways. That’s why schizophrenia, epilepsy, and other diseases affecting cognition have the same physiological effects across the subjects we study. That’s why, in fact, all of us can be fooled by the same magician’s illusions. But the illusions and the ilnesses don’t have a “point” – they simply result from the known structure of the mind working improperly, but predictively improperly.
Your statement that the scriptures don’t seem made for convenience is interesting, and I agree with it to some extent. I’ve always said that not all the contradictions of scripture are unintended goofs, but may be quite intentional attempts to create a dialogical text capable of responding to complex, changing social needs. The Protestant fundamentalist tradition gives us the impression that we have to see the Bible as a repository of simple moral truths or disregard it altogether, and I think that approach misses the mark. The Bible scribes must have known that at least some of the ideas they were putting into the Bible contradicted others, and probably meant to intentionally include a plurality of viewpoints. Have you ever read Walter Brueggemann, especially his “Theology of the Old Testament?” It’s interesting stuff.
Where I suspect I may part company from you, though, is when it comes time to ask about meaning or point of this plurality is. I suspect you will say that since the Bible is not a “convenient fiction,” it is probably not a fiction at all. (That’s a common trick in apologetics: conflate two logically distinct terms such as “convenient” and “fiction,” make them
seem inextricably intertwined,and then reach false conclusions when the two are really not found together after all. C.S. Lewis made a career out of that sort of thing.)
Of course, fiction need not be convenient, and it’s best when it’s not. There’s nothing convenient about Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man,” or Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” or any other book that rewards because of its complexity and ambiguity. And many literary critics through the ages have said that great narrative fiction fosters our moral sensibilities precisely for that reason. So I agree the Scriptures aren’t convenient, but they need not be anything other than good fiction.
Phil
For what it’s worth, the idea that “human nature” is a fixed thing and changeless from one generation to the next is a fundamental pre-requisite for the main scam.
It makes possible the view that all human beings are replaceable as individuals, makes us into integers which can then be value-determined by weight.
This is, again, counter to fundamental biological reality.
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And as a complete tangent, it may be that morality isn’t even the main issue at the moment.
Pragmatic analysis may lead to the possibility that we are about to wiped out by something that could fairly be called an “accident”. And thus be void of moral content altogether.
The insistence by so many intelligent persons on dragging everything into the moral arena and endlessly battling it out may actually be more self-indulgence than truth-seeking labor.
Because, as ironic as it might be to have these moral issues decided by their suddenly being made entirely irrelevant, the main purpose of all this moral/immoral theist/atheist debate, was to point us in the direction of viability, wasn’t it? Isn’t it?
That the truth is not only more satisfying but more likely to further our chances for surviving?
So that our self-extinction, by incompetence or tantrum, while being essentially non-moral in intent, would tend to trump all that philosophizing in the long and short run, wouldn’t it?