Author: Bill Vallicella

John Hick

John Hick has negotiated that mysterious transition that awaits us all.  Here is one take on his passing.  I saw him in action only once.  I recall him questioning whether Jesus ever claimed to be God.  An ill-mannered colleague of mine attacked him for that, churlishly.  Hick retained his equaninimity, projecting a superiority that was yet without a trace of superciliousness.  That impressed me and furnished me with yet another insight into the hierarchy of the spirit and the inequality of human beings. 

Hick's An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent is required reading for philosophers of religion.  I have two posts on Hick.

John Hick on Religious and Naturalistic Definitions of Religion

No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

On the Dictionary Fallacy

A reader inquires:

I am looking into the dictionary fallacy for an essay, and your blog post is the only thing I could find. Do you happen to know some other sources on the fallacy?

As far as I know, I invented the dictionary fallacy, or rather, I invented the label and provided some preliminary analysis of this typical mistake in reasoning.  If anyone knows of something similar in the literature, please shoot me an e-mail.

On Calling Obama a Socialist

It is a tactical mistake for libertarians and conservatives to label Obama a socialist. For what will happen, has happened: liberals will revert to a strict definition and point out that Obama is not a socialist by this definition. Robert Heilbroner defines socialism in terms of "a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production." To my knowledge, Obama has never advocated such a thing. So when the libertarian or conservative accuses Obama of socialism he lets himself in for a fruitless and wholly unnecessary verbal dispute from which he will emerge the loser.

It is enough to point out that the policies of Obama and the Democrat Party lead us toward bigger government and away from self-reliance, individual responsibility, individual liberty, and sound fiscal policy.

It is even worse to label him a 'communist.' Every communist is a socialist, but not every socialist is a communist. If our president is not a socialist, then a fortiori he is not a communist. It is intellectually irresponsible to take a word that has a definite meaning and turn it into a semantic bludgeon. That's the sort of thing we expect from leftists, as witness their favorite 'F' word, 'fascist,' a word they apply as indiscriminately and irresponsibly as 'racist.'

Religion and Superstition

Julian Baggini asks: Can a religion survive being stripped of its superstitions?

Baggini does not tell us explicitly what he understands by  'superstition,' but the context suggests that he takes the term to apply to any and all supernatural elements in a religion, whether these be beliefs, practices, or posits such as God and the soul.  The supernatural, in turn, is anything beyond or 'outside of' the system of space-time-matter, or anything that makes reference to such things.   God conceived of as a bodiless person, as in mainstream Western monotheism,  would then count as a supernatural being.  Accordingly, belief that such a person exists would count as a superstitious belief, and prayer in all its forms (petitionary, intercessory, contemplative, etc.) would count as a superstitious practice.

Supposing (counterfactually) that this is true, one might be tempted to make the journey to the East in quest of a religion free of superstition.  One of Baggini's points is that Buddhism as actually practiced by millions is rife with it, as witness motorized prayer wheels, etc.  Baggini's main thesis is that a religion stripped of supernatural elements ceases to be a religion.  A Buddhism naturalized, a Buddhism disembarrassed of all such elements, is no longer a religion but something acceptable to secularists and atheists, "a set of beliefs and practices to cultivate detachment from the impermanent material world and teach virtues such as compassion and mindfulness." 

Baggini's claim is that what is specifically religious about a religion are its superstitious beliefs, practices, and posits.  To put it another way, every religion is essentially superstitious.  But of course 'superstitious' is an adjective of disapprobation: a superstitious belief is  a false or groundless belief; a supersitious practice is one that is ineffectual; a superstitious posit is one that does not exist.  So in claiming that religion is essential superstitious, Baggini is claiming that it is essentially false, ineffectual, and devoid of reference to reality.

Of course, I disagree.  For one thing, I reject what Baggini assumes: naturalism.  But I also disagree because he rides roughshod over a fairly elementary distinction.

There is religion and there is pseudo-religion.  Superstition is pseudo-religion.  That adherents of religions are often superstitious in their beliefs and practices is undeniable.  But to the extent that they are superstitious they are pseudo-religious.

Let's consider an example. A believer places a plastic Jesus icon on the dashboard of her car. It seems clear than anyone who believes that a piece of plastic has the power to ward off automotive danger is superstitious. A hunk of mere matter cannot have such magical properties. Superstition in this first sense seems to involve a failure to understand the causal structure of the world or the laws of probability. A flight attendant who attributes her years of flying without mishap to her wearing of a rabbit's foot or St. Christopher's medal is clearly superstitious in this first sense. Such objects have no causal bearing on an airplane's safety.  It is magical thinking to attribute to bits of plastic and metal the powers the superstitious attribute to them.

But no sophisticated believer attributes powers to the icon itself, or to a relic, or to any material thing qua material thing. The sophisticated believer distinguishes between the icon and the spiritual reality or person it represents.  

Well, what about the belief that the person represented will ward off danger and protect the believer from physical mishap? That belief too is arguably, though not obviously, superstitious in a second and less crass sense. Why should the Second Person of the Trinity care about one's automotive adventures? Does one really expect, let alone deserve, divine intervention for the sake of one's petty concerns? How can religion, which is about metanoia — change of mind/heart — be justifiably hitched to the cart of the mundane ego?

I don't think it can be denied that much petitionary and intercessory prayer is superstitious.   Someone who prays to win the lottery is superstitious  as is a person who, upon winning, exclaims, 'There is a God after all.'   The nauseating egotism of such a remark is antithetical to genuine religion.  But suppose I pray for a friend who has contracted a deadly disease.  I pray, not for some divine intervention into the course of nature, but that he be granted the courage to endure his treatments, and should they fail, the courage to accept his death with hope and trust and without rancour or bitterness.  It is not obvious that such an intercessory prayer (or a similar petitionary prayer should I be the sick man) is superstitious despite its invocation of a transcendent power to grant courage and equanimity.  'May the Lord grant you peace' is a prayer for a spiritual benefit.  Unless one assumes naturalism — which would be question-begging–  there is nothing obviously superstitious or pseudo-religious about that.  An even better example would be, 'Let me see my faults as clearly as I see the faults of others.'  Such a prayer is a prayer for the weakening of the ego and to that extent not motivated by any crude materialism.

The sophisticated non-superstitious believer is not trying to achieve by magical means what can only be achieved by material means; he is aiming to achieve by spiritual means what cannot be achieved by material means but only by spiritual means. Perhaps we can characterize superstition as pseudo-spiritual  materialism.

Getting back to the icon on the dashboard:  what if the icon serves to remind the believer of her faith commitment rather than to propitiate or influence a godlike person for egoistic ends? Here we approach a form of religious belief that is not superstitious. The believer is not attributing magical powers to a hunk of plastic or a piece of metal. Nor is she invoking a spiritual reality in an attempt to satisfy petty material needs. Her belief transcends the sphere of egoic concerns.

To sum up.  Assuming that religion necessarily involves supernatural elements, religion and naturalism are incompatible.  So if naturalism is true, then religion is buncombe, a tissue of superstitions.  But there are powerful reasons for rejecting naturalism.  In any case, that all of religion is bunk is rather hard to swallow given its prevalence and usefulness.  (Here one can mount a pragmatic argument premised on the consensus gentium.)  It is a good bet that there is something true and right about a cultural and a symbolic  form that has won the adherence of so many distinguished people over all the earth in all the ages.  But if we are to make sense of religion as a cultural form that has a core of rightness to it, then we need the distinction between religion and pseudo-religion (superstition) — the very distinction that Bagini clumisly rides roughshod over.  (Can one ride in a clumsy fashion?)

Companion post: Grades of Prayer

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Gerry Rafferty

The Guardian obituary has him born on 16 April 1947 and dead on 4 January 2011.  I recall his smash Baker Street from the far-off and fabulous summer of 1978.  It came over the car radio in my quondam girl friend's Toyota  many times as we drove from Boston, Mass to Dayton, O to secure me an apartment there.  I hated leaving the Athens of America for the dreary Midwest, but I had landed a tenure-track job and one goes where the jobs are.  In retrospect, I was extremely lucky to get that job.  Was I the best of the 100 people who applied for it?  Not even I believe that.

Is Religion for the Weak?

We haven't heard much from Jesse Ventura recently, leastways not on the topic of religion, but I recall him some years ago saying in effect, 'Religion is for the weak!' at which provocation various religionists jumped up and retorted, 'No it's not!' Such knee-jerk opposition avails nothing. Ventura is in fact right. What Ventura doesn't appreciate, however, is that we are all weak. The correct response to Jesse 'The Body' Ventura is not one of diametrical  opposition but one of ju-jitsu-like concession.

We are all weak relative to a standard of true strength. We are weak  in body, in mind, in will. We vacillate in our affections. A body that   can lose its strength in a split-second due to a brain aneurysm, say, is only relatively, contingently, and temporarily strong. Such strength is nothing to crow about. Or is Ventura's strength so awesome that it is proof against every contingency? Can he maintain it indefinitely? Is he causa sui? If not, then why is he so proud of his prowess?

The great religions teach the simple truth about our weak and indigent condition. (Whether these religions provide a genuine solution to it is another question.) The proper counter to Ventura is to point out to him that the sense in which he thinks that religious people are weak is not the sense in which they know that we are all weak. Religion is  not a projection of the merely contingent weakness of some of us, but a sober recognition of the necessary weakness of all of us. Religion doesn't exist to make good the deficiencies that we can and must make  good by our own efforts, but to ameliorate the deep-going deficiencies  that none of us can ameliorate individually or collectively by our own efforts.

Cottingham, Wittgenstein, and the Religious Impulse

John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52:

     . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound
     sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to
     be . . . .

This is not quite right, as it seems to me, even if '"would wish to be" is read as "ought to be."   The sense of the gap  between 'is' and 'ought' is undoubtedly part of the religious impulse,  but there is more to it than this. It must be accompanied by the sense that the gaping chasm between the miserable wretches we are and what  we know we ought to be cannot be bridged by human effort, whether  individual or collective, but requires help from beyond the human-all-too-human.   Otherwise, the religious sensibility would  collapse into the ethical sensibility. There is more to religion than ethics. The irreligious can be aware of the discrepancy between what  we are and what we should be. The religious are convinced of the need for moral improvement together with a realization of their impotence in bringing it about by their own efforts.

I had an undergraduate professor whose symbol for religion was:

 Rx_symbol

I like that because it conveys that religion is for the sick.  And sick we are.  An awareness of our root sickness is an element in the religious sensibility.  Dubious as Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion is, he is absolutely on target in the following observation:

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect (unvollkommen), as ill (krank).  Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched (elend). (Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Winch, p. 45e, emphasis in original)

Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the ‘Deformation’ of the God Concept

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.

What Dennett is implying is that the original monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human. Dennett thereby simply begs the question against every sophisticated version of theism.

Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.

Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity.  Compare the extremes of the spectrum of positions I set forth in Anthropomorphism in Religion.

Dennett's Dilemma — to give it a name — is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific) assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum  such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I will surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism.  Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. (See J. P. Moreland's The Recalcitrant Imago Dei for one case against it.) Dennett's reliance on naturalism is thus dogmatic and uncompelling. Indeed, when he pins his hopes on future science and confesses his faith that there is nothing real apart from the system of space-time-matter, he makes moves analogous to the moves the theist makes who goes beyond what he can claim to know to affirm the existence of a spiritual reality within himself and beyond himself.

Dennett needs to give up the question-begging and the straw-man argumentation. His talk of the "deformation" of the God concept shows that he is unwilling to allow what he would surely allow with other subject-matters, namely, the elaboration of a more adequate concept of the subject-matter in question. Instead, he thinks that theists must be stuck with the crudest conceptions imaginable. Thinking this, he merely projects his own crude materialism into them.

Genuine religion is ongoing, open-ended and (potentially) self-correcting.  It is more quest  than conclusions.  We don't hold it against science that its practioners contradict each other over time and at times. That is because we understand that science is an ongoing project, open-ended and self-correcting.  That is the way we should treat religion as well.  If you protest that there are huge differences between religion and science and that the latter has been highly successful in securing consensus while the former has not, I will simply agree with you and chalk that up to the great difference in their respective subject-matters.

It is no surprise that natural science secures consensus: it has available to it the touchstone of sense experience.  We all have sense organs, while the same cannot be said of moral and spiritual 'organs.'

‘Legally Dead’

Someone declared legally dead  is presumed dead.  Such a person may or may not be dead. So I say 'legally' in 'legally dead' is an alienans adjective.  What is the test for an alienans adjective?

Let 'FG' be a phrase in which 'F' is an adjective and 'G' a noun.    'F' is alienans if and only if either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot validly move from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack'  is alienans.

'Legally dead' is like 'apparent heart attack' if we replace 'dead' with 'dead person.'  If Smith is a legally dead person, it does not follow that he is a dead person.  If a legally dead person should show up at your door, you don't dub him 'Lazarus.'

These linguistic niceties, besides being intrinsically interesting,  are sometimes philosophically relevant.

More on this in the Adjectives category. 

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bicultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages.  My mother was both bilingual and bicultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a  difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values.  Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African?  Does he enjoy dual citzenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead.  There is no 'institutional racism.'  There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals.  Man up and move forward.  Don't blame others for your problems.  That's the mark of a loser.  Take responsibility.  We honkies want you to do well.  The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

But here is an encouraging development: many blacks according to yesterday's WSJ are rejecting the 'African-American' label.  

Giles Fraser Credits Nietzsche with Making a Christian of Him

Two things I like about Fraser's Guardian piece are that he appreciates Nietzsche's deep religiosity and the role that his worship of power played in the development of Nazi ideology.  Both of these points should infuriate leftists which of course constitutes an excellent recommendation of them.

See Nietzsche and National Socialism.  Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life contains some discussion of Fraser's Nietzsche book. 

As for Nietzsche's religiosity, here is the way I put it in one of my aphorisms: "His was the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus wedded to be bladed intellect of the skeptic."