I Believe Because They Believe and Vice Versa
The Fifth Carnival of the Godless is posted. And I’ve been meaning to point out this post at Normblog for days. He points out what seem (from the available evidence, e.g. what the article reports) like rather dubious bits of reasoning in an article about the possible evolutionary basis for religion.
There is one quite convincing comment in the article though. It gestures at something I often think.
Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. “When you’re in a belief system, it’s not that you stop asking questions, it’s that they become irrelevant. Why don’t you ask yourself about the existence of gravity? It’s because a lot of the stuff you do every day presupposes it and it seems to work, so where’s the motivation to question it?” he says. “In belief systems, you tend to enter this strange state where you start thinking there must be something to it because everybody around you is committed to it. The general question of whether it’s true is relegated.”
Exactly. We’re often told some variation on the theme ‘Millions and billions of people have believed this stuff for thousands of years, so there must be something to it.’ But that just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it. Everybody looks around and says to herself, ‘By golly, everybody for miles around believes this crap, so there must be something to it, so I’d better shut up about the fact that I think it’s all fairy tales.’ We don’t have a clue how many people would have believed it without the shoring-up effect of all those millions and millions, so the argument isn’t worth much, is it.
Or to put it another way, if everyone believes because everyone else believes, then it could be that everyone believes only because everyone else believes, and no one believes independently of everyone else. No one believes because she already believes and would believe even if she’d been raised by wolves. So then why should anyone believe? Eh? I mean, what kind of argument is that? ‘Well all those other people believe!’ ‘Yes, but that’s only because people like you have been telling them “All those other people believe,” and pointing in this direction.’ It’s hollow. ‘Isobel believes because you believe.’ ‘Oh dear – but I believe because Isobel believes.’ ‘Err…’
This bit is misleading in an interesting and I suspect deliberate way: “Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated.”
Religious belief may not be solely found in the uneducated, but surely it’s worth mentioning that religious belief is INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL to education: The more educated a person is, the less likely it is that the person is a religious believer. And that’s not just a modern Western phenomenon: At every time and place where education hasn’t been under direct control of religious authorities, religious belief has been inversely proportional to education.
And that, ladies and gents, is why the religious right wants prayer in school and evolution out.
“The Religious Right” – is that the same as the Vast Right WIng Conspiracy? – wants prayer in schools because they believe prayer is fundamental to their way of life, producing better outcomes for all concerned. Removing it is to them withdrawing a fundamental ‘good’, like clean air.
As for evolution, I think that the creationists are a great argument for abolishing religion in education entirely. Second only to Saudi-funded Islamic schooling.
“When you’re in a belief system, it’s not that you stop asking questions,…It’s because a lot of the stuff you do every day presupposes it and it seems to work, so where’s the motivation to question it?”
But a praxiological basis of belief is not just confined to religion, but applies to all manner of beliefs, including scientific ones, and is by no means unreasonable. Not only does one struggle to make one’s behavior accord with one’s beliefs, but one holds, often enough, to a belief because one is already committed to the behavior. There is a connection between belief and behavior, a non-isomorphic correspondance between what one says and what one does, that exercizes a compelling force that virtually everyone, short of the most winged-out postmodernists, at least dimly feels. On the other hand, the notion that truth is simply knowledge of the real, a view implicitly held by all the Classical Greco-Roman philosophers, with the sole exception of the “Pyrrhonian” skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, and which was transmitted via the Thomist definition of truth as the “adequatio intellectus et rei”, the “correspondance theory” of truth, proves difficult, to say the least, to sustain or substantiate. (The old standard objections were: how could an idea be like a thing, so as to correspond with it, and how could we separate out our ideas of things from things themselves and still have knowledge of them?) Though I wouldn’t want to assimilate beliefs to knowledge, under the doctrine that knowledge is “justified true belief”,- since “knowledge” and “belief” are different words with different uses and functions,- wouldn’t it be better to consider the overlapping criteria and cross-implications of cognitive claims with respect to their relevant phenomenal fields in addressing the ways cognitive claims function in regulating beliefs, rather than simply dogmatically citing their unique access to reality, since that would bring out the surely cognitively significant fact that differences in beliefs often involve differences in practical commitments? At any rate, the notion that anyone could believe something in complete isolation from what anyone else believes could scarcely function as a criterion in the matter. Would not that just be to regress to the sollipsistic Cartesian notion that private consciousness is the sole ground of “certain” knowledge?
As for the issue of religion itself, the fact that many millions claim to believe and persist in believing in religious ideas, inspite of, by now, several centuries of criticisms: well, isn’t that just the interesting thing about the matter, and in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with the “truth” of religious ideas? Even if one follows out the anthropological critique of religious ideation as a compensatory function, a legitimate deployment of the reductio ad hominem,- though, in fairness, it could be equally applied to aspects of secular ideation,- one does not thereby dissipate the needs and aspirations involved. Valid criticism can not evade or avoid taking account of the latter: call it the burden of despair. But the invention of a “scientific” explanation for the matter does nothing to advance any common understanding of the stakes. It’s rather more of a useless redundancy. In particular, the appeal to evolutionary biology is a non-starter, since religion is pre-eminently a cultural phenomenon: only with language can the questions and the troubled identity that religious ideas struggle to address arise. The notion that the alleged imperative of a self-consistent naturalism requires an explanation in the pre-given, under the rubric of “adaption”, is complicit in the instrumentalist reduction of knowledge that is, at least according to me, as bad as the worst delusions of religious ideation.
Yes, I noticed that interestingly misleading sentence. “but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated.” Is by no means the preserve of is indeed interestingly vague. Is perfectly compatible with, say, the existence of .001% of the nonuneducated who embrace religious belief.
John, that’s what the article is saying, with the gravity example – that we assume all sorts of things, because they ‘work’ in one way or another and so we have no motivation not to.
“one does not thereby dissipate the needs and aspirations involved. Valid criticism can not evade or avoid taking account of the latter”
Yes, so we’re everlastingly told. But what of it? What follows from that? Needs and aspirations exist; of course; they can’t all be satisfied; also pretty much of course; so what follows? The fact that a lot of people ‘need’ or want to believe in a kind god who takes care of them doesn’t cause that god to exist (except perhaps in their own minds, which for some people is good enough). So I don’t see what the force of that objection is. I don’t think many atheists deny that a lot of people want to believe in such a god. They just don’t think wants and wishes are magical.
Wow, OB, that was pretty impressive response to all those twenty-dollar sentences.
But the responses to this sentence were fun:
“Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated.”
Having been a member of churches (and families) where the norm, not the exception, was university education at all levels I find this a piece of condescending, misdirecting, dishonest shite.
Actually, the quote from the article attempted to shade off one thing into another: sleight-of-hand. But I was, in my usual $.10 a dozen manner, and in response to some of the usual philosophical malapropisms, attempting to suggest that, since there is no such thing as a knowledge of reality in itself,- (oddly, such a claim is made for some forms of religious experience, in which the devotee claims to sense or relate to a divine presence, for all its absence from the world),- “reality” can not be used as a blunt instrument to hit people over the head with. Reality, at any rate, of its own accord, will manage to accomplish that much better over the long haul in much meaner and subtler ways. And I also meant to suggest, out of therapeutic generosity, if too opaquely, that there were alternative accounts of truth and knowledge to the unworkable “correspondance theory”, that OB seems to favor in her more unreflective moments, and to epistemological notions that there is a unique and unitary criterion for knowledge that can serve as a “foundation” for all knowledge. Those alternative approaches would bear different implications as to what one could reasonably say about the status and bounds of beliefs.
Perhaps because I come from a more Marxist background, in which tradition the point was signally made that religious alienation was not simply an illusion, but also a distorted reflection of real conditions, and that it called precisely for the transformation of the conditions in which real needs and aspirations were routinely suppressed,- (another failed prophecy),- I don’t tend to view the persistence of religious beliefs as simply an error to be propagandized away, for all that their politicization is distressing. But the argument that the persistence of religion is solely due to people pretending to believe what other people pretend to believe is incredibly weak: no one believes it, least of all religious believers. (That is a theme of the fierce black comedy of Flannery O’Connor, herself a stenuous believer.) A more reasonable explanation of why people claim to profess religious beliefs is that they seek shelter from their own persistent inability to be in accord with themselves, which may well be an endemic condition and is certainly amenable to religious interpretations. (At least, that is better than the self-mechanization involved in being a proud owner of an SUV). But, in a world in which the majority of the planet’s burgeoning population live in endemic misery,- (the usual factoid is that the majority of the population of the world lives on less than $2 per day, which ignores the issue of purchasing price parity and the degree that they live in fully monetarized economies, though it stands as a shorthand proxy),- I hardly think that needs and aspirations can be blythely dismissed, in favor of hard-nosed realism, especially when so much of the technicity of the modern world seems to be organized to perpetuate such conditions. It would be hard to imagine that such people, no matter how unimaginably constrained their circumstances, would not experience their own distinctive needs for recognition.
Finally, the identification of religious belief with magical thinking shows the dimmest grasp of the territory. (Consult the canto of the “Inferno”, wherein sorcerers and fortune-tellers are punished.) And the crude criticism of “wishful thinking”, in the name, presumably, of adaption to reality, scarcely passes muster. Does one not wish for the good, under whatever manner of construal? And can imagination be forfeited to reality, while still leaving the cognitive force of attention to reality intact? Is not “immagination” a name for the counterfactual limning of possibilities and the gauging of the ungaugeable fact of potentiality?
“But the argument that the persistence of religion is solely due to people pretending to believe what other people pretend to believe is incredibly weak: no one believes it, least of all religious believers.”
But that’s not what I’m arguing, obviously. I’m simply arguing that the argument ‘Lots of people have believed it and still do so there must be something to it’ goes around in a circle.
“I hardly think that needs and aspirations can be blythely dismissed”
But I keep saying – I’m not blithely dismissing needs and aspirations. Why do you keep on teaching granny to suck eggs?
“the identification of religious belief with magical thinking shows the dimmest grasp of the territory”
I didn’t say anything about magical thinking in this post. But I have in others – but I don’t think I identify religious belief with magical thinking, in the sense that I realize there can be more (or less) to it. But I do think magical thinking is very, very often a large constituent part of it.
Yes, of course imagination is those things, but what of it? What follows from that? Imagination is not identical with religion and vice versa. One can imagine counterfactuals other than a deity, and one can imagine counterfactuals without asserting that they are factual.
john c halasz:”But the argument that the persistence of religion is solely due to people pretending to believe what other people pretend to believe is incredibly weak: no one believes it, least of all religious believers.”
OB:But that’s not what I’m arguing, obviously. I’m simply arguing that the argument ‘Lots of people have believed it and still do so there must be something to it’ goes around in a circle.
ChrisPer:
Not only is it circular, it is actually true. Doubt IS assuaged by observation of other believers’ faith; people ARE influenced by their observation of others pretending to believe. This is a basic of social psychology.
How else could the fervent young in the Soviet Union, China and Kampuchea have bootstrapped themselves to equally unthinking believer status to radical Christian converts? And the things they did and do in the name of their belief… group ‘struggle’, self-criticism, denunciation, purging.
OB:
“Lots of people believe it and still do, so there must be something to it…”
But there are two forms of circularity: the “vicious” circularity of a petitio principii and a hermeneutic circle, which has to do with understanding the relations between parts and a whole, when the understander is his/herself situated, that is, a part within a whole and so necessarily carrying his/her premises or presuppositions along. As a weak, indeed, sophistical, argument from mere convention, that sentence would be “visciously” circular, but equally virtually no one, outside a journalistic context, would be tempted to make it. But otherwise that sentence is perfectly reasonable- (it echoes the Aristotelian principle of “the many and the few”)- and the conflict of interpretations is over what that “something” is or might be.
Now you and I, unbelievers both, might be wont to carefully label our imaginary ideas as imaginary. Is that a strength or a weakness? Do we really know the extent to which our imaginary reaches? Or, conversely put, how much of the imaginary could we realistically do without, and still maintain our sense of reality? Potentiality and counterfactuality, (as with, e.g., the holding to norms), are not simply to be trumped by (an appeal to) the facts, precisely because they play a constitutive role in our sense of reality. (If you’ll recall your Heidegger, human beings are never anything but potentiality, which is what is distinctive about them and why they can not be captured or construed in terms of a substance ontology, and it is precisely for that reason that they are necessarily “thrown” upon facticity.)
As to “teaching granny to suck eggs”, well, I point to that large extension that we are wont to call reality,- (well, as well, because you seem to favor such ostensive definition, and just to be mean),- or what I would prefer to call “the lay of the land”, including, in accordance with my hallucinatory lexicon, “dead” people,- because I am interested in the mysterious connection between justice and compassion, which I don’t know quite how to rationally justify. I certainly don’t think that that notion is the exclusive property of religion,- (and I don’t need a recitation of the litany of “religiously” inspired actrocities, since I can readily do that spade-work myself),- but if there is any such thing as a religious atheism- (perhaps Levinas?)-, then it certainly lies there, since the limits of human agency are all too apparent. At any rate, I don’t think that sober-mindedness or moral vigilance correlates well with the divide between religious believers and unbelievers. That is perhaps because there is little incentive for taking stock in either.
ChisPer:
I am well aware- as who isn’t- that there is a pervasive mimetic component in human behavior. Equally coeval, there is a resistance to that, a drive or struggle for differentiation. (The comedy occurs where claims for exclusive differention hinge upon mimetic behavior.) But I am suspicious of the citation of extreme instances as paradigm cases. Equally, I am suspicious where all the cases are supposed,- through some kind of alchemical logic,- to be associated with the left.
“Yes, of course imagination is those things, but what of it? What follows from that? Imagination is not identical with religion and vice versa.”
True – in fact, there are some ways in which imagination and religion might be at odds. After all, it doesn’t take much imagination to look at the world and say, “God did it.” It does take considerably more imagination to see the world as the result of only natural processes in which god(s) played no part. Of course, it also helps to know something about the phsyical world, the philosophy of science and all that…knowledge tends to expand the imagination in this regard.
Phil
“in fact, there are some ways in which imagination and religion might be at odds.”
Good point. I’ve just read a similar one in Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – in discussing Locke’s it is “impossible to conceive that ever bare incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being”. Dennett says this statement perfectly illustrates “the blockade to imagination that was in place before the Darwinian revolution.”
“Do we really know the extent to which our imaginary reaches?”
No, but we have a fairly good guess, especially on the negative side. And in any case, again, what follows from your question? That we should just believe any old thing? Why should we do that? That way Heaven’s Gate lies.
What follows? The point was the one’s sense of reality, -not, mind you, reality itself, whatever that may be- in part depends on idealizations, something imaginary. And that is, in part, because human beings exist as bearers of a potentiality which can never be reduced to the pregiven, which is another way of saying that they are held to a responsibility that can never be reified into reality, be pointed to as that there. Does that threaten to entangle one in paradoxes? Are paradoxes guaranteed a priori never to occur? The upshot is not that one should be required to believe in religious nonsense, but simply that one should acknowledge that there is a certain parity between religious and non-religious forms of belief, and there’s no shame in that. Of course, the point is not that one should lend credence to any sort of imaginary nonsense that lays claim to religion and suspend critical discrimination. But equally the forms of magical thinking are not restricted to religious beliefs; not only are secular forms plentiful, but, if one examines cases closely, they can be found popping up like weeds in the carefully cultivated fields of scientific and technological thinking.
That scientific knowledge is, in part, a product of imaginative thinking is very much to the point. That would be one of the reasons that I think the attempt to reduce consciousness to underlying computational algorithms to be mistaken, to be badly missing the point.
Thanks for letting me play in your sandbox OB!
John c., you rightly chide me for throwing leftist cases only forward. Note however that I equate them, not contrast them, with Christian converts’ zeal. That attractive, glowing certainty I have seen in leftists, Raja Yoga converts, young Iranian Muslims and right-wing bloggers as well as Christians; fairness would have picked a mixed bunch. If I were old enough I would have seen it personally in Komsomol and Hitler Jugend too.
ChisPer:
You’re right, insofar as I forgot to mention that the comedy of exclusive differentiation hingeing on mimetic behavior is also a cause for horror, -(silly me, I forgot my Kafka, whose imperturbable, but rigorous absurdity embraced both cases)-, but I’m not in the habit of trying to reason with zealots. (My good fortune is ravishing!) The point remains that the extreme instances do not determine the general case. What calls for attention is rather the conditions that make for extremity. And that is where any question of “conversion” occurs.
Well, that can’t be the whole story. I myself have the religious temperament I am sure, but I also have an empirical one. My religious beliefs and ideas are very private — or have been until recently — and receive virtually zero support from the people around me, be they friends, family, people on the net, you name it. That hasn’t made my reglious ideas and feelings go away however. I offer this for what it is worth.
john c, thanks for condescending to let me join in. If you are calling me a zealot you are way out. I am a refusenik. I won’t drink the kool-aid at the evangelical church I was going to, though my beloved has.
If I get you right, you feel that the ‘convert’ is generally extreme, or conversion as an institution is an indicator for extremism of the social grouping. You or some hypothetical class of persons implied in your passive language, may feel horrified at the sheeplike aspects of people.
My own family allows me to observe that several intelligent people, who converted around 1935 to Communism, are to this day a rabid ‘extremity’ subject to doubtful conspiracy views of history.
Mimetic behavour, to use your term, is critical to humans in good and bad situations. How the hell else do we know to tip our hats to the ideas of the new ruling class? “Enforcing mimetic standards” is a good way to describe the thought policing of our society, political correctness. My colleague from Poland says they were bound in unfreedom under that old regime, but we in the West bind ourselves instead.
ChrisPer:
Well, that last one was not the clearest of posts. Those more used to my lumberings are not surprised. But I meant, to the contrary, to object to the identification of religion with fanaticism, which may or may not be the case, and to suggest that “conversion” can go both ways: one can convert into a maniacal enthusiasm or one can convert to a sober taking-of-stock.
Thanks john, that helps.
Look forward to reading your thoughts again!
ChrisPer