Another insipid essay
Well I couldn’t pass that up.
So I read it.
I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation.
Well naturally not! “God created the world” is just a claim of magic, and there’s no nailing down the details of that, or the “method” either. You could pause to wonder what “God” means and how anyone knows, but we wouldn’t want you to go to too much trouble. “God did it” is the easy way out.
I have long been influenced by early church theologians like Augustine of Hippo, who understood the biblical creation account as primarily making theological claims instead of offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins.
You don’t say. It seems to me you don’t really need to go to Augustine for that, bless his North African heart, because obviously the biblical creation account is not offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins – it says nothing explanatory at all.
She was happy with this arrangement until churchy anti-vaxxers started messing up her head. Why weren’t they being churchy and pro-science like her? What had gone wrong?
I asked Haarsma who is to blame. Is it the fault of religious communities for denigrating science or the scientific community for denigrating faith? She laughed and said there’s plenty of blame to go around.
At times, a vocal minority of prominent scientists have marginalized religious communities. Haarsma cited a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent astrophysicist, from Christmas morning 2014: “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton.” That’s clever, but it appeared to mock Christians on one of our most sacred holidays. These sorts of messages spur needless animosity. If the cultural conversation requires people to choose between their faith and science, most will choose faith, but we don’t have to ask people to choose. This is a false choice.
Neil deGrasse Tyson said happy birthday to Isaac Newton, so god-botherers are spreading the virus to their friends and neighbors. Makes sense.
“Sometimes people say things like, ‘If everyone would just accept the science, the world would be great,’” Haarsma said. But she notes that science doesn’t solve everything and that scientific communities have to “acknowledge the value of religion as a way of answering life’s biggest questions.”
No, actually, they don’t, because religion has no such value, because it isn’t a way of answering life’s biggest questions. It may be a way of cheering yourself up, but answering questions (in the sense of giving an answer that’s truthful), no.
I suppose if “life’s biggest questions” include things like “What is moral?” or “What is the good life?” then yes, science can’t answer those; for those, we have to turn to philosophy. So if religion is a form of philosophy, then it can provide answers to those questions. Of course religion isn’t a particularly good form of philosophy, and for the most part its answers boil down to “Because god (or the gods) said so.” But hey, it has answers.
Religion and philosophy are opposites, really.
If only religion could cheer me up, it tends to do the opposite. :P
@2 Damn, too slow again. ;)
Philosophy is love of wisdom, religion is love of easy answers to everything, so yeah.
In other words, Covid is proof that God still hates us. :P
This reminds me of the statement that Tony Benn made in an appearance with Dawkins several years. I don’t think it’s original to him. He said “Science answers the question of how the world goes, while religion answers the question of ‘how’ the world goes.”
Apparently for Christians “Let there be” is a detailed enough reason for how, but still we are left to guess why. Our priests and nuns seemed to be happy to explain that God was lonely, for an infiinite or an infinite period in the past, then figured out that he could speak the universe into existence. I always wondered what took so long. And why make us sinners, and why, if he was lonely, was he so remote? None of these why’s had satisfactory explanations, Tony.
‘If everyone would just accept the science, the world would be great,’
It wouldn’t be great. Terrible things would still happen. Disease would still exist. But it would be better.
I think those scientists who dismiss philosophy are mistaken. I do not think those scientists who dismiss religion are mistaken.
Philosophy, art, literature, humanities…all are attempting to answer “the big questions”. They don’t have any exact answers on most things, but at least they can ask the right questions. And “what does god want” is not the right question.
Well, that part’s easy. Can you imagine how boring it would be to sit around and watch a bunch of saints all the time? I mean, what would Othello be without Iago?
God wants us to suffer. — Buddha, ca. 500 BCE :P
There are plenty of questions to which science doesn’t currently have an answer. One thing every single one of these questions have in common is that religion is even less capable or answering them. As much as quoting Dawkins now makes me feel dirty, I think the following passage from his essay The Great Convergence (reprinted in A Devil’s Chaplain) hits the nail on the head:
Again, it’s rather like saying “I’m entitled to claim for free what you have to pay for. And I get do decide how much you have to pay. And I reserve an unlimited right to keep raising the price for all eternity to make sure it stays forever beyond your current means. Never mind that I am even less capable of paying the price I demand from you – or any price what so ever. As long as you don’t manage to raise an amount that can’t be added to, the amount I have to pay is $0,-
(another way in which the Gender of the Gaps exactly parallels the God of the Gaps)
There is a social club in Boston called the St Botolph Club (“Boston” derives from “St Botolph’s Town”, I hear). The club has a drinking song about the club’s namesake, St Botolph, who loved the sinners, “for without them, saints would have nothing to do”.
Yeah, this is ridiculous. As if celebrating Darwin’s birthday with a sly nod to the American holiday for Lincoln’s birthday is an insult to the US. No, it’s just a funny reference to a calendar coincidence.
I agree with you about philosophy. There was a time when I thought very poorly of philosophy, but I can see there is merit in a lot of areas now. There is also junk, which I’m sure is true of a lot of “squishy” subjects; psychology does a lot of important work and a lot of junk, for instance. Science that ignores epistemology and logic and issues of motivated reasoning (among many other things) does so at its peril.
I don’t agree that art, literature, and humanities are, as fields, attempting to answer “the big questions”, or necessarily any questions at all. Some, but not all, work in the arts is emotive or expressive; other works are perhaps more about entertainment or exploration or craft or simply beauty.
I recall a novel about an artist group who lived together in a loft. They had high-minded ideals about art. They wanted to put on a show. The one female member of the group was constantly sniffed at for her pedestrian paintings of flowers instead of “meaningful” art. Ultimately, she was the one who raised enough money for the show, because people actually enjoy and buy pedestrian paintings of flowers.
I often hear theists make this claim, and it is flat wrong.
We have a good observational theory of morality as it occurs in humans (and some other primates), and that theory does say what it moral.
What’s an observational theory of morality?
Re “moral”, Phil Zuckerman in “What It Means To Be Moral” makes a compelling argument that religious morals based on texts like the bible are actually immoral; they are obedience, not morality.
I’ve argued the same thing. It’s part of the argument of Does God Hate Women? of course.
I also spent a lot of time saying why Sam Harris’s “argument” in The Moral Landscape is so bad.
Morality is a mechanism that humans have evolved to help us get along in groups–in society–without too much conflict and fighting. If you want to understand human morality, you watch–observe–how humans behave in groups, and maybe ask them what is right and wrong.
Sackbut, while there is art and literature that is trivial and mostly entertaining, it still usually deals with the big questions, even if unintentionally. Someone painting flowers is looking through a particular lens of life, and seeing things maybe others don’t see until she paints it. Every piece of art or literature has a message, whether intentionally or not. It shows people in particular roles, doing particular things, and helps develop our expectation of ourselves and others, often stereotypical. But most of the works I have read or seen do have at least some whiff of “big questions”, the number one being, it seems, what is love and why do we love.
I have a play I wrote for my thesis. When I wrote it, I hated it. Turned out, I set out to write a drama and wrote a comedy, but I did not realize it was a comedy until my mentor was laughing and enjoying it, and telling me that rewrites should enhance the comedic moments. Later, when we were discussing it, he asked if I hated it because it wasn’t an “important” play. Ah, but it was “important”. It was about overpopulation, but the message was wrapped in a story people enjoy for itself. I hated it because I thought I wrote a drama, and as a drama, it didn’t work. I didn’t think I could write comedy; now I write comedy all the time, and though most of it is storytelling, it is storytelling about something, even if that seems a trivial something. It usually isn’t.
As an example, there was this strongly panned movie called Drop Dead Fred. No one I know (except me) thinks there was anything about big questions in there. They think it was just a goofy movie. It wasn’t hard for me to spot the big question, which dealt with emotional abuse of children. Because it wasn’t physical abuse, no one seemed to notice it, so it wasn’t about a “big question”.
I will maintain my assertion that all art and literature is about big questions, whether anyone knows it or not. It worms its way into our consciousness in ways I don’t think most of us are aware of. I wasn’t until my Drop Dead Fred moment.
Steven @ 19 – Oh well yes of course, but it’s not quite that simple, to put it mildly. There’s a vast literature on the subject. Different groups have different moralities, so just watching one or several isn’t going to deliver a simple and unarguable theory that says what is moral. This is why Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape is so bad: he thinks it’s a much simpler matter than it is.
Let’s go to Afghanistan and observe morality there. People are selling their daughters into slavery. The Taliban is treating women and girls like livestock. Watching them won’t give us a good theory of what is moral.
I agree with ikn @20, to a person who has been exposed to good philosophy there are questions everywhere, it’s a skill that can be taught, a way of looking at things, critical thought, analysis, concepts, etc., and it can also be in some people’s nature to have different levels of ability to see things with a philosophical mindset. It’s more of a way of thinking than what is thought about. Literature has a great treasure of examples of things that stir the imagination and make people wonder about questions that are not implicit in the work itself, and art as well, even if they are not considered ‘philosophy’ proper. When done right there is a certain beauty to it. :)
iknklast, I don’t agree about literature any more than I do about technical manuals or assembly instructions, but I concede that you may have a point, at least when words are involved. I don’t agree about music or visual art or architecture. I think part of the problem is what you and I think of as “the big questions” may have little overlap. I don’t think that a picture of flowers has anything whatsoever to do with “what is love” or “what is beauty”. One may look at the picture and think about those questions, certainly. The picture may be an attempt to create something beautiful, or it may be an attempt to practice a painting technique, or it may be a copy of painting on a wall. It may have meaning to a viewer, but that doesn’t require that the artist put it there. And if the artist didn’t put it there, then I think the idea that the art addresses “the big questions” is not supported; some viewers may be inspired to address “the big questions” after viewing the art, but the art itself does not address them. Some art, sure, but not all art, and not “art” in general.
Music is an area I know somewhat better. I tend not to think music is “about” anything at all. Stravinsky had some well-put statements to that effect. I make no distinction between a freshman theory exercise in counterpoint and a Beethoven symphony; both are music, and if something is inherently true of music, it must be true of both. It is possible that some listeners may be inspired to consider “the big questions” when listening to or analyzing great symphonies, but I am not among them.
Sack, you realize that your analysis is somewhat philosophical, right? It’s more of a meta-analysis, but still… :D
@Steven #15.
But people asking the question: “Can science answer what is moral?” Are not asking for a description of what morals occur in humans and other primates. That seems like when you are interested in whether science can answer what is a good diet that we have observed what people prefer to eat and that in that sense we can answer what a good diet is.
Don’t hit; don’t lie; don’t cheat; don’t steal. That’s your basic human morality, and it’s the same everywhere.
The problem in Afghanistan isn’t that the Taliban have a different morality. The problem is that they are immoral. What they are doing is wrong.
The function of morality is to reduce conflict and fighting in society. It doesn’t always work, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, or is culturally determined, or is arbitrary. Contrawise, if what you are doing is violent, or leads to violence, that is a prima facie case that it is immoral.
No, it’s really really not that simple.
Given that life is fundamentally terrifying, people need something to manage this fear*. Religion addresses that need (however awkwardly), whereas science and philosophy fall short for most people.
Also, “science” (knowledge, implications, and such) require a chain of authority (e.g. politicians) to reach the farmers, and they’ve been burned before (by greed, corruption, etc.), so they’re understandably skeptical.
*see Ernest Becker, or “Flight From Death” 2003
No, you don’t get to weasel out of it that easily.
To the Taliban, what they are doing is moral as it is authorised by their interpretation of a couple of ancient texts. They are not acting on their own behalf, but on behalf of a higher power who directs their every move.
Now you and I may think their actions are immoral, but they also think our music, dress, joi de vivre, etc are immoral.
If you truly want a good observational theory of immorality as it occurs in humans, then you must observe religious practices. Ignore their words, simply observe their actions.
601 @29:
Ah yes, religion of course being well-known for its lack of corrupt and/or greedy authority figures…
I imagine that every religion does this, but I do find it amusing how Christians catapult themselves into the finals of “Sciences vs. Religion,” conveniently bypassing all the playoffs that would have to take place against all the other religions in order to actually earn that spot. Hell, there are hundreds of versions of Christianity alone that would have to go up against each other, too.
Before “Religion” gets to go head to head with Science in the Explaining Reality Championship, it has to figure out a few things. There are so many things that religions have never agreed upon with each other, even before facing Science.
One would think that the existence of a class of supernatural beings, attested to by most if no all cultures throughout history, would be an observable fact about the universe. The evidence would suggest otherwise. Still, we must not let “religion” off the hook. If its answers to the “Big Questions” are all different, then it doesn’t bode well for their chances in the finals. But even before we let them anywhere near big questions, they should answer a whole bunch of small ones about the basic ground rules of their particular brand of game-play. (Not that they haven’t been killing each other for centuries over obscure articles of faith; but still.) Here are a few bits of theological housekeeping they should clear up before wading into the questions of meaning and purpose upon which they are so keen to expound.
Is there one god, or are their multiple gods?
Are gods begotten, created, or eternal?
Do gods have a sex? How could one tell?
Do gods ever mate with each other?
Do they ever mate with humans?
Are there things beyond the power and abilities of gods to know, do, or create?
Religions over time and space have come up with different answers for all of these questions. Before being allowed to enter the contest with Science, they should be expected to answer these questions, and to justify the answers they give.
“God created the world” is just the culturally accepted “a wizard did it”.
My experience has been completely different. Religion did not comfort or manage fear, it created it. A child being told god is going to burn them for the tiniest transgression is terrifying. Praying “if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take” can make for sleepless nights…and I had plenty of those as a child even as young as six.
Perhaps a moderate believer who doesn’t think about it much but believes in a benign and loving god finds comfort. For many, though, especially fundamentalists, religion creates the terror it then promises to take away. I see it over and over again among my family and my fundamentalist friends…the slightest slip, the slightest curse, the skirt slipping even a fraction of an inch up on the knee…and they are down on their knees praying for forgiveness.
Science, though, gives us something solid. It doesn’t promise salvation, which is good because it can’t deliver. But it does remove many of the fears of the world by curing diseases and clearing away the mysteries of the universe at least a little bit. For me, science was a salvation. It was my ticket out of the slough of despond where my frightening childhood dropped me. It was a ticket to a brighter place, a place where curious people studied interesting things and didn’t say “shut up we don’t talk about that” when you had questions.
I hear this all the time…religion comforts. I am sure it does for some, but I have not seen it. Religion terrifies. And those people it comforts may be gaining their comfort at the expense of other people. Such as my mother who believed she was being saved for eternity by battering her children in the name of God.
I am so damned sick of hearing how religion comforts. Get a clue…religion frightens, and it does that deliberately. Comforting people can get you only so far; frightening people can get them to turn over everything they own to you, and follow you wherever you lead.
Fear is not a bug in religion; it is a feature.
@Screechy Monkey #31
A rural pastor (local tribe, socially connected) doesn’t represent a significant greed/corruption threat. The serious issues come from “big city” authority figures; predatory lenders, Walmart re-zoning, environmental regulation, and such.
Of course, as religion scales up (e.g. Mega Churches) it does get more interesting.
@iknklast #34
The overwhelming predictors of religiosity are fear and ignorance [citation needed, sorry].
I would expect anyone here already has the courage to face reality without a religious crutch. But how we deal with nihilism and such varies by individual.
Children are a special case, in that their indoctrination is interspersed with their awareness development. But the goal of most religions is to have itself be the solution to the core fears, plus additional smaller fears to avoid apostasy. The only time you need “fearless” followers is when you’re trying to stand up an army (ironically altruism is necessary prerequisite for war).
For many adults something (anything) is needed to address death and chaos, but being afraid of hell is within their control (rituals and such), so it’s easily preferred.
I’m pretty sure the most important predictors of religiosity are geographical/cultural origin and the religion (or lack thereof) of one’s parents. Dawkins used to open his book talks for The God Delusion with the following observation
He also used to display one of those familiar color-coded maps of the worlds, in which the colors represent the dominant religions in different areas, and point out how absurd it would be if instead the colors represented the most widely accepted scientific theories, e.g. about how the dinosaurs went extinct. After all, the truth itself can hardly be one thing in the red areas and something else entirely in the blue areas (etc.), nor can the evidence and arguments for one theory be that much stronger, objectively speaking, in the green areas than in the pink ones.
Like the many best-left-unspecified’s of Gender Ideology, it’s one of those implicit, unstated premises we’re not supposed to draw attention to, because as soon as you do, it’s looks obviously suspect:
(srroy for all teh tyops in tath lsat psot. There is in fcat one wrod in tehre tath’s not mispselled)
How did Tyson’s tweet (a tweet!) “marginalize religious communities”? It would be absurd to say that it even particularly annoyed very many members of religious communities for more than thirteen seconds without a bloody great wadge of evidence, but marginalise?
If we take ‘marginalise’ in the sense of ‘not giving unthinking and unwavering central importance to’, then sure, it did that. But so does virtually every other tweet and the vast majority of everything that has ever been said or thought. Picking on that one tweet or on Tyson himself as the prime example surely requires some explanation. Why didn’t they pick a tweet about my cat to illustrate the same thing? It wouldn’t have been as witty or clever, but there might have been a picture.
So I think we have to take it in the other sense, which is to force religious communities into a marginal societal role. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a single tweet and the resulting enormous upset to all societies all across the globe doesn’t seem to have made much difference, I have to say.
Bjarte:
I know, and not in a good way. But damn it if he hasn’t put some things beautifully over the years. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype were masterpieces, even though Dawkins does have a tendency to labour the point (I should talk) and they were an absolutely essential part of my childhood. Religion just never took hold in me, despite the best and sometimes violent efforts of my parents. I just couldn’t see the difference between Christianity and any other fairy tale. And I didn’t want to, I knew I was on to something. But I didn’t know how to express that, even to myself. Dawkins’ early pop science was vital to helping a tediously preconscious 8 year old to do that. I’ll treasure that, even while being so often confounded and confusticated by Dawkins in later years.
It’s been said (including by Dawkins, although I don’t have a reference to hand) that science and philosophy are both processes as well as bodies of work, whereas religion is very much not. I’m not sure that’s quite right; religion seems to me to be a process of temporarily shoring up gaps as they come under scrutiny before allowing them to fall back into disrepair immediately afterwards. That and paying off the victims of sexual abuse. And subjugating women. And trying to force everyone to do and think as they are told. These things don’t happen by themselves, people, it’s a process!
I’m being facetious, I understand the statement’s sentiment and it’s worth bearing in mind. Science and philosophy are in part toolkits for understanding stuff we observe or perceive. Religious scholarship can have some overlap with that in intent, but it’s deliberately hobbled by always begging the question.
@Bjarte Foshaug #37
I believe Dawkins is referring to the choice of the flavour of religion.
Since fear and ignorance often occur in geographical clusters (e.g. poor countries with limited resources and education), the general level of religiosity will also reflect that.
Someone “food insecure” with little education is much more likely to pray for rain (or an NGO food program) than would a Scandinavian pray for warm weather.
Curiously, the USA is a outlier with both high wealth and high religiosity. Many suspect (as do I) this is best explained by their weak social safety net. Americans without health insurance pray more often.
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latsot #39
I agree. I read all his books up to and including The Magic of Reality, and loved them all. I also used to devour every online talk, lecture, interview, or article I could find. For years I donated a monthly pledge to the RDF. I defended him (with at least some success) from critics in countless debates etc. If “Dear Muslima” and everything that came after had never happened, I would probably still be in his corner*. I feel slightly less dirty by reminding myself that an argument should stand or fall on its own merits, and if the only thing that keeps you from throwing out a book is the assumption that the author is a great person, you should probably never have found it compelling in the first place. If Helen Joyce came out in support of Trump tomorrow, it would not make her wrong about Gender Identity Ideology. But it goes both ways: Just because because someone gets a few things right, it doesn’t mean they’re great people or even right about anything else. Every self-appointed “skeptic” and “critical thinker” already claims to know this, of course, but theory and practice are still two very different things.
601
Of course with any complicated phenomenon like religion, there is always going to be more than one explanation. I certainly agree that the psychological need to alleviate fear of death (as well as wishful thinking** in general) is a major part of the explanation for why religions (as well as belief in all sorts of other New Age nonsense and supernatural woo) hold such an appeal in the first place. Still, I strongly suspect that childhood indoctrination, group conformity, and old habit (“I believe it today because I believed it yesterday. And I believed it yesterday, because I believed it the day before that etc. etc.”) are even more important factors. There’s a reason all the major faith-based religions are so eager to get to the children before anyone else does, before they have what it takes to make a truly informed decision on their own. Because once they already believe, psychological mechanisms like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning kick in to make sure the religion enjoys a significant “home field advantage” forever after.
* Ironically, when I couldn’t support him in the shitstorm over “Elevatorgate”, everyone on his side seemed to instantly jump to the conclusion that I was just hopelessly biased against him and always had some vested interest in discrediting him, when, in fact, my bias was very much in the other direction. If anything, I might legitimately be accused of over-compensating.
** There is at least anecdotal evidence that something I wrote on my old webside (R.I.P.) lead to the deconversion of some Christians. If the story is true (which is a major “if”), that’s very revealing indeed, since the article in question was all about atrocities in the Bible and didn’t make any argument for or against the actual existence of God (I had already made that case in another article). If belief in God were based on evidence and reason, it’s unclear to say the least why learning that the Bible portrays Yahweh as a monster should change anything (after all, why should an evil God be less likely to exist than a good one?). It is however, exactly what we might expect if faith is based on wishful thinking: Make the conclusion seem less desirable, and all of a sudden the arguments in its favor don’t look so compelling after all.
601, I suspect the illusion of comfort is stronger than actual comfort. I have seen some studies (take with a grain of salt since they were sociology, and usually those studies have huge holes in them) that atheists actually deal better with death, both their own and that of loved ones. That doesn’t mean we don’t feel, we don’t grieve, just that we manage to come to grips with it better.
As for fear? I remember a day back in 1997 when I was driving home from school, a busy highway, a beautiful day. Finals were over, I was about to get my B.S., the wind was blowing through my hair, and the radio was playing. For the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE, I felt free, happy, and without fear. A few days before that, I had thrown the last shards of God in the trashcan, admitting that what I clung to so my family wouldn’t kill me was an image, an illusion, a deception. I have never since felt the enormity of fear and apprehension. The fear is still there, yes. Apprehension is still there, yes. It is impossible to live in the world without those at least some of the time. But they are much more manageable, and I have never since tried to off myself.
Judging from the Christians I have known, even the moderate ones seem to be living in a state of anxiety about god, death, heaven, whatever. They are not at peace. The fundamentalists live as if death was the only thing to live for, but for the most part are not able to face it with dignity or grace…and why should they? It’s frightening.
From what I see, my personal experiences across the spectrum of belief, if religion is intended to comfort, it is not doing its job. If religion is intended to make people good, it is not doing its job. If religion is intended to dupe poor people out of their money, it is doing a damn good job. I suspect for a lot of people religion is a dodge. It’s a hustle. A comfortable way of securing your own confidence that you are one of the chosen. But that does not bring them the comfort they expect,
Also, the assumption always seems to be that comfort from fear and pain is a good thing. Fear and pain serve valuable roles in warning us of danger,. When I see things like the note on a cork board offering people to make their own comments on global warming, I know that comfort may be a horrible thing. The notes said things like “Don’t worry, God’s got it” and “We can’t possibly mess up God’s creation”. That’s dangerous.
The Epicureans were very good at explaining how unconsoling religion is.
The epistemic vigilance needed the address “big questions” and such, is simply not available to the religiously committed crowd. Much like an addict self-medicating religion to cope with existential terror.
Since conservatives have a higher sensitivity to fear, they are more likely to use religion to manage the very real challenges of death, chaos, and lack of control. Even many atheists embrace the “free will” myth to maintain an illusion of being in control.
Asking religious people “How would you feel if you found out your God doesn’t exist?” usually exposes the terror for a few hundred milliseconds. Whereas atheists respond with a nervous chuckle to the opposite question.
@Ophelia – I hope I’m doing this link properly
Here’s the citation I needed earlier:
https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/why-do-levels-of-religious-observance-vary-by-age-and-country/
“This has led many researchers to observe that people in poorer parts of the world are, on average, more religious than those in societies with advanced economies. Other indicators of economic development – such as education, life expectancy and income equality – also tend to align with measures of religious commitment.”
It’s been a few days, but I wish to apologize for my muddled thinking and digressive commentary earlier in the thread.
Of course philosophy sometimes (but not always) deals with “big questions”, by whatever definition. Of course the arts sometimes (but not always) deal with “big questions” as well. As iknklast said.
My objections arose from many, many previous discussions I’ve had with other people regarding the nature of music, what makes music “good”, what makes it “music”. I extend that somewhat glibly to other arts, but the concern in my mind is always about music. I am a firm adherent of the idea that music is simply organized sound, that it has no inherent meaning or emotional content, that such things are imported by the listeners, sometimes in accordance with the desires of the composer and/or performer. I don’t think of music as a language, certainly not one that necessarily conveys emotions. I don’t think that only “good” music or “well performed” music is “music”. Not surprisingly, many people disagreed, and many writers disagreed, but I was pleased to find some support for what I was trying to say in the writings of Stravinsky and others.
The discussion here sparked my thoughts in those directions, incorrectly, irrelevantly, and I started going down that argumentation path in my head before I realized it was a different argument. Again, my apologies.
(Yes, it’s a philosophical argument, twiliter. I recognize and appreciate that now, but when these thoughts were first in my head, philosophy was on the do-not-touch list for me.)
Gosh, I don’t see any need for apologies. I thought your comments were interesting.
It’s funny about music, I notice it in myself all the time – it stirs up feelings that seem profound in some way but…have no content. Of course advertisers and dictators and the like are well aware of this effect, and exploit it.
Also, I meant to say at some point: I don’t really believe in such a thing as “the big questions.” Life the universe & everything, as Hitchhiker’s Guide put it.
Sack @46 I think your perspective is interesting too, it made me think. :) As far as philosophy in music I’ll leave this here…
Have I been blind?, Have I been lost?
Have I been wrong?, Have I been wise?, Have I been strong?
Have I been hypnotized, mesmerised, by what my eyes have found?
(from Carnival by Natalie Merchant)
Maybe the musical notes themselves aren’t philosophical, but lyrics sometimes point to the examined life. ;)
I’ve had many arguments (including with myself) about whether lyrics should be considered music or literature. I don’t consider them music, but I deal mostly in music where lyrics are previously written texts or added to music interchangeably. And I deal with instrumental music. I find it very weird when people are asked to tell me about a song and the first thing they receive are the lyrics. Bob Dylan didn’t win the Nobel Prize for music (yeah, yeah, there is no such prize, but never mind).
But sometimes vocal music is indeed written to help convey the text, and sometimes in a very detailed way. And sometimes instrumental music is written with some sort of extra-musical intent. I have mixed feelings about such things, except perhaps for the technique of “word painting”, but they not only exist, they are common.