Author: Ophelia Benson

About the theist four-step again – I’ve been pondering the fact that 2) and 4) are a tricky combination. What would it even mean to have reliable knowledge that ‘God’ is ‘good’? It’s not really even possible to know that. It’s possible to believe it in a sense, but not to know it.

It’s possible to imagine having reliable knowledge that God exists – and that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and that it wants us to do certain things and not others. But that it is good? No. Because that’s not knowable in principle.

Imagine it. There’s been some global mass revelation that puts it all beyond question. Included in that is God’s own declaration that God is good. And – it tells us to torture animals for fun, to torture small children, to bully women, to exploit people in proportion to the darkness (or lightness) of their skin; to lie, to cheat, to destroy, to cause pain and harm in every way we can. Would we ‘know’ all that was good? No. We only know God is good if the way God is good – even if God declares its own goodness itself – is what we ourselves think is good; we can’t know it if God’s idea of good turns out to be our idea of horrible wickedness. So all we can know about that is what we already know. (This is just ‘Euthyphro’ again.) If it turned out not to be what we already know, but something that pulled in the opposite direction – we wouldn’t know that; we would know we had awakened into a nightmare.

And even if God told us ‘good’ rules, we still wouldn’t know, because the principle itself is dubious – because it’s external and hierarchical and authoritarian, and thus not good enough.

We could be robots – and have a set of instructions, which produce the least harm possible in any given situation. That wouldn’t make us ‘good.’ It would just be an algorithm. Good isn’t a meaningful concept unless it’s internal to us, unless it belongs to us rather than being an externally imposed command, like ‘turn right at the next stoplight.’

It has to be internal, and also emotional* to mean anything – to match what we mean by the word. The word refers to human motivations and intentions and feelings. An external recipe or blueprint just doesn’t do that.

From that point of view, the whole idea that morality is linked to God is really very fundamentally mistaken, so fundamentally that believers probably agree, whether they know it or not. It’s ‘good’ that they really believe in, not ‘God.’ (If God turned out to be real and also self-evidently cruel and wicked, they would [perforce] believe in God’s reality but not its goodness; they would no longer ‘believe in’ God in the sense that mingles loyalty with cognitive acceptance. That’s a very flat assertion – but I think it’s fair. I pay believers the compliment of thinking they do pretty much universally associate God with goodness.)

Imagine a reliably knowable God whose rules are not incidentally or incompletely cruel but thoroughly and systematically so – the usual ‘God’ in every other way, but sadistic and merciless. Would anyone love that God? No – not even Pat Robertson would. (Fred Phelps might.)

It’s not God that believers love – it’s ‘good.’ It’s Good, and they just conflate that with God.

What a better happier more peaceful world it would be if we all actually understood this. Not perfect, but better.

*Hume’s ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’

Is this true?

What is missing from the book is much sense of what a world without religion, or one that had not had religion in it, might look like. Lots of the principles that Mr Hitchens holds dear, like tolerance and justice, are secularised versions of religious ideas.

Are tolerance and justice secularised versions of religious ideas? What does that in fact mean? I suppose that the ideas originated in religion and that no one ever thought of them independently of religion, though they have now become partially secularized, but only partially since there are always people saying they are in fact religious. But is that true? I don’t believe it. I think people were able to and did conceive of ideas like tolerance and justice for secular reasons. I also think religions have not historically been particularly concerned with either tolerance or justice, so it’s not clear to me why they have this reputation for being the original source of such ideas (or those of equality and individual worth, either, which are also often attributed to religion).

It also seems fair to say that the process works at least as much in the other direction – that religions have adopted some political and moral ideas that are much more favoured now than they were historically, thus borrowing some of the moral prestige of what are basically secular shifts in attitudes.

Something I wonder about – Jonathan Derbyshire commenting on something Chris Dillow said:

“I should stress here that my beef is not with religion as such. It’s about the role it should play in politics. In an egalitarian polity, in which people should be persuaded rationally of policies, religion should have no place – even if it is true. Religion might motivate political beliefs, but it shouldn’t, and needn’t, be the public justification for them.”

In other words, the truth or otherwise of religious beliefs is irrelevant to the question whether they should play a role in public deliberation. So the putatively religious roots of Gordon Brown’s egalitarianism oughtn’t to worry us so long as they play no role in his public justifications for it.

Is the truth or otherwise of religious beliefs really irrelevant to the question whether they should play a role in public deliberation? I’m not so sure. But it’s tricky – because what’s really relevant is not just whether or not the beliefs are true but whether or not we know they’re true (or not true), and whether we all know it, and how we know it and how confidently we know it. In other words, it’s a reliable knowledge issue again. It has to be. Why, in an egalitarian polity, in which people should be persuaded rationally of policies, should religion have no place? Because rational persuasion can get no foothold in the absence of reliable knowledge. What’s needed for rational persuasion is not just truth but also reliable knowledge of the truth. But both are needed – if we have reliable knowledge and what we reliably know is that the religious beliefs in question are not true, then surely that’s not irrelevant.