Category: Religion

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.'

The Sudduth Surge Continues

Before I posted Michael Sudduth's open letter on Saturday, site traffic for the month was averaging between 1600-1900 page views per day;  yesterday, however, saw a surge — the Sudduth surge to give it a name — up to 2880, and now, at high noon Tuesday, I'm at 2200.  Meanwhile, the industrious Mr. Lull (cybernaut extraordinaire, etc. etc.) has supplied me with two further links on the topic.

Daniel Silliman, The Experience of Conversion as Always-Already Having Been.  From the title alone I know that Mr. Silliman has come under the influence of Heidegger:  'always already'  is a Heideggerism familiar to students of Sein und Zeit as immer schon.

And scroll down here for a review of Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology.

UPDATE (5 PM):  traffic for the day came to 2965 page views.  I thank you for your patronage.

Belief Change

The indefatigable Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace, friend and facilitator of many a blogger, pointed me this morning to Triablogue where there is some commentary here and here of a mainly churlish sort on the recent conversion of Michael Sudduth.  Comments like those encountered there reinforce me in my view that comboxes are often better kept closed, except that our old friend Tony Flood did surface there and made a decent comment.  (I wouldn't be surprised if it was the industrious Lull who hipped Flood to the Triablogue posts.)

In any case, reading Flood's comment put me in mind of his main site and I wondered what was happening over there.  Well, it looks like old Tony himself has made a doxastic shift too, one  back to his origins:

I have returned to the Christian orthodoxy from which (this may come as a surprise to some of you) my thinking strayed. Those fields did not yield what they seemed to promise. The harvest of my intellectual discontent is still on display here, but henceforth new content will reflect my new-old interests.

My current priority is situate myself mentally within Christian orthodoxy, a matter that I do not think has been settled for me. I believe myself to be a member in good standing of the Roman Catholic communion within the Catholic Church, from whose fold I do not exclude Eastern Orthodox and Reformed Christians.

The distinguished members of Tony's Gallery of Heroes are now under quarantine.

Inasmuch as mature religion is more quest than conclusions, a truth  lost on the New Atheists and their cyberpunk auxiliary legions, belief change is to be expected and is often  a sign of a vital and sincere seeking for a truth which is hard for us in our present predicament to discern.  So my hat is off to Mike and Tony as the one swims the Ganges while the other refreshes himself in the Tiber.

Addendum 1/23:   Logging on this morning, I found three messages from Dave Lull and one from Tony Flood.  Lull apprises me of a second comment by Flood at Triablogue, a comment even better than the first, one that I have just now read, and mostly agree with.

Michael Sudduth Converts to Vaishnava Vedanta!

The New Year has brought me quite a lot of surprising e-mail, but the following missive wins the surprise prize.  (Since Dr. Sudduth has sent his open letter to numerous correspondents, and has posted it on his Facebook page, I feel entitled to post it here in its entirety without his explicit permission.)  Comments later, perhaps.  A fascinating document. 

Continue reading “Michael Sudduth Converts to Vaishnava Vedanta!”

John Haldane on Christopher Hitchens

The piece ends as follows (emphasis added):

Hitchens is a case worth studying. He is more interesting than Dawkins because evidently more psychologically complex and humanly engaging. If we Catholics are right about God and humanity, why was he so wrong? Or, put another way, what can we learn from his attitude about how to understand our own religious claims and about how our lives reflect them? Hitchens pointed to the record of evil associated with Christianity and with Catholicism in particular. It is glib to reply that humanism has its own tale of terrors, and problematic if we also claim that religious adherence brings transforming grace. If I were to take up Hitchens’s campaign against religion it would be to ask again and again: “Where is your grace and your holiness?”

This challenge has particular force against those who downplay human sinfulness and the extent of depravity. Not until we have taken seriously the idea that the effects of sin and ongoing sinfulness corrupt the soul will we be in a position to fashion an effective counter to the charges Hitchens brought against Catholicism and Christianity more generally. It will not be to say that we are better than he claimed. Rather, we need to explain effectively our failings and those of all humanity in terms of a shared supernatural identity. To which we might add, adapting a saying of Wilde’s, whose style of wit Hitchens sometimes echoed: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking to heaven in hope of salvation.”

Two comments. 

First, I don't find it at all glib to point out the horrors of atheistic humanism which in the 20th century alone are greater than those inflicted over 20 centuries of Christianity.  The purpose of pointing that out  is to underscore the fact that it is not religion as religion that is the source of the horrors, but dogmatic adherence to a worldview, whether religious or anti-religious,  that permits the suppression and murder of opponents.  Bigotry and hate have their source in the human heart, not in religion or in humanism.  Certain forms of religion and humanism may give carte blanche to the exercise of murderous impulsees, but the animating cesspool and prime mover ansd applier of doctrines is and remains the human heart.  It is a fundamental mistake of leftists to seek the source of evil in something external such as religion or capitalism when its source is in a mind made dark by a foul human heart.

But I wholly agree with Haldane that religious people need to explain why their beliefs and practices are so ineffective in transforming their character.  We all know people whose fervent religiosity has made scarcely  a dent in their fundamental nastiness.  Why does religion contribute so little to the amelioration of people?  Twenty centuries of Christianity and even more centuries of Buddhism and we are still tearing each other apart, body and soul.  As for glib remarks, Chesterton's takes the cake: "Christianity hasn't failed; it's never been tried." (Or something like that; I quote from memory.  If you have the exact quotation in its context with references, e-mail me.)  If it hasn't been tried by now, it will never be tried.

Of course, one can argue that the religious would have been worse without religion and I don't doubt that that is true.  And not only are the religious better than they would have been without it, the irreligious are also better than they would have been without it.  For religion supplies the morality that civilizes and humanizes, a morality that permeates the social atmosphere and affects even those who reject the metaphysical underpinnings.  Unfortunately, Western civilization now appears to be running on empty, on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian-Athenian  tradition, and one fears what happens when they too evaporate.  A good question for the New Atheists:  once your suppression of religion is complete, what will you put in its place?  How will you inculcate morality, and what morality will you inculcate?

Although Haldane does not mention the Fall by name, he alludes to it.  The explanation for religious inefficacy anent moral transformation has to involve the notion that man is a fallen being.  Although the religious are not much better than the irreligious, they at least appreciate their fallen condition.  They at least know they are in the gutter, and knowing this, are inclined to do something about it.

Addendum:  My thanks to several readers who have quickly responded with the correct G. K. Chesterton quotation. It is at the end of the following paragraph:

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

It is from What 's Wrong with the World, Part I, Chapter 5.  I am now inclined to say, having seen the context, that my calling the quotation glib  was itself somewhat glib.

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism: Notes on the Preface

I now have Alvin Plantinga's new book in my hands.  Here are some notes on the preface.  Since I agree with almost everything in the preface, the following batch of notes will be interpretive but not critical.  Words and phrases  enclosed in double quotation marks are Plantinga's ipsissima verba. 

1. Plantinga is concerned with the relations among monotheistic religion, natural science, and naturalism.  His main thesis is that there is "superficial conflict but deep concord" between natural science and monotheistic religion but  "superficial concord but deep conflict" between science and naturalism. 

2. The great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) affirm the existence of "such a person as God."  Naturalism is a worldview that entails the nonexistence of such a person.  "Naturalism is stronger than atheism." (p. ix) Naturalism entails atheism, but atheism does not entail naturalism.  One can be an atheist without being a naturalist.  John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart is an example. (My example, not Plantinga's.)  But one cannot be a naturalist without being an atheist.  This is perhaps obvious, which is why Plantinga doesn't explain it.  Roughly, a naturalist holds that the whole of reality (or perhaps only the whole of concrete reality) is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  No one who holds this can hold that there is such a person as God, God being a purely spiritual agent.

To put it my own way, theistic religion and naturalism could not both be true, but they could both be false.  This makes them logical contraries, not contradictories.  Their being the former suffices to put them in real conflict.  For many of us this is what the ultimate worldview choice comes down to.

3. Plantinga rightly points out that while naturalism is not a religion, it is a worldview that is like a religion.  So it can be properly called a quasi-religion.  (p. x) This is because it plays many of the same roles that a religion plays.  It provides answers to the Big Questions: Does God exist? Can we survive our bodily deaths? How should we live?

I would add that there are religious worldviews and anti-religious worldviews, but that natural science is not a worldview.  Science is not in the business of supplying worldview needs: needs for meaning, purpose, guidance, norms and values. Science cannot put religion out of business, as I argue here, though  perhaps in some ways that Plantinga would not endorse.

4. Given that naturalism is a quasi-religion, there is a sense in which there is a genuine science vs. religion conflict, namely, a conflict between science and the quasi-religion, naturalism.  Very clever!

5. Plantinga's claim that "there is no serious conflict between science and religion" puts him at odds with what I call  the Dawkins Gang and what Plantinga calls the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.  Plantinga, who never fails us when it comes to wit and style, suggests that the atheism of these four "is adolescent rebellion carried on by other means" (p. xi)  that doesn't rise to the level of the the old atheism of Bertrand Russell and John Mackie.  "We may perhaps hope that the new atheism is but a temporary blemish on the face of serious conversation in this crucial area."  That is indeed the hope of all right-thinking and serious people, whether theists or atheists.

6. Plantinga fully appreciates that modern natural science is a magnficent thing, "the most striking and impressive intellectual phenomenon of the last half millenium." (p. xi)  This has led some to the mistake of thinking that science is the ultimate court of appeal when it comes to the fixation of belief.  But this can't be right for two reasons.  First, science gives us no help in the areas where we most need enlightenment: religion, politics, and morals, for example. (p. xii)  There are worldview needs, after all, and science cannot supply them.  "Second, science contradicts itself, both over time and at the same time." (p. xii)  Indeed it does.  But no one, least of all Plantinga,  takes that as an argument against science as open-ended inquiry.  A question to ruminate on:  Should not religion also be thought of as open-ended and subject to correction?

7.  I would say that if there is demonstrable conflict between a religious belief and a well-established finding of current natural science, then the religious belief must give way.  Plantinga commits himself to something rather less ringing: if there were such a conflict, then "initially, at least, it would cast doubt on those religious beliefs inconsistent with current science."(p. xii).  But he doesn't think there is any conflict between "Christian belief and science, while there is conflict between naturalism and science." 

8. One apparent conflict is between evolution and religion, another between miracles and science.  Plantinga will argue that these conflicts are merely apparent.  Theistic religion does not conflict with evolution but with a "philosophical gloss or add-on to the scientific theory of evolution: the claim that it is undirected . . . ." (p. xii) As for miracles, Plantinga says he will show that they do not violate the causal closure of the physical domain and the various conservation laws that govern it. "Any system in which a divine miracle occurs . . . would not be causally closed; hence such a system is not addressed by those laws." (p. xiii)  That sounds a bit fishy, but we shall have to see how Plantinga develops the argument.

9. As for the "deep concord" between theistic thinking and science, it is rooted in the imago Dei.  If God has created us in his image, then he has created us with the power to understand ourselves and our world.  This implies that he he has created us and our world "in such a way that there is a match between our cognitive powers and the world." (p. xiv)  I would put it like this: both the intelligibility of the world and our intelligence have a common ground in God.  This common ground or source secures both the objectivity of truth and the possibility of our knowing some of it, and thereby the possibility of successful science.

10.  But when it comes to naturalism and science, there is "deep and serious conflict."    Naturalism entails materialism about the human mind.  It entails that we are just complex physical systems.  If so, then Plantinga will argue that "it is improbable, given naturalism and evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable."  If this can be shown, then the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is not rationally acceptable. "Hence naturalism and evolution are in serious conflict: one can't rationally accept them both." (p. xiv)  

Articles by Alvin Plantinga

Here are twenty articles by Alvin Plantinga, a philosopher who needs no introduction to the readers of this weblog. (HT: Mark Anderson) 

A Response To Pope John Paul II's Fides Et Ratio
Advice To Christian Philosophers
An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
Augustinian Christian Philosophy
Christian Philosophy at the End of the 20th Century
Christian Scholarship: Nature
Christian Scholarship: Need
Darwin, Mind and Meaning
Evolution, Neutrality, and Antecedent Probability
Intellectual Sophistication and Basic Belief in God
Methodological Naturalism: Part 1
Methodological Naturalism: Part 2
Naturalism Defeated
On Christian Scholarship
On Rejecting the Theory of Common Ancestry
Theism, Atheism, and Rationality
Truth, Omniscience, and Cantorian Arguments
Two Dozen or so Theistic Arguments
Two (Or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship
When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible

Beckwith, Hitch, and the Foundations of Morality

Here.  Excerpt:

. . . [Christopher] Hitchens writes that he and other atheists “believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion,” thus implying that he and others have direct and incorrigible acquaintance with a natural moral law that informs their judgments about what counts as an ethical life.

But to speak of a natural moral law – a set of abstract, immaterial, unchanging principles of human conduct that apply to all persons in all times and in all places – seems oddly out of place in the universe that Hitchens claimed we occupy, a universe that is at bottom a purposeless vortex of matter, energy, and scientific laws that eventually spit out human beings.

Right.  It is easy to confuse two very different questions, and Sam Harris, one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, does confuse them as I argue here. 

Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?

However it be answered, (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as part of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though it is of interest sociologically.   Suppose we grant, arguendo, that the answer to (Q1) is in the negative.  Now contrast (Q1) with

Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?

The agreed-upon code is one that most or many atheists and theists would accept. Thus don't we all object to child molestation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft, lying, and swindling in the manner of Madoff? Even swindlers object to being swindled!  And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. Just imagine some minimal objectively binding code that all or most of us, theists and atheists alike, accept.

What (Q2) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

Beckwith is quite right that the naturalist/physicalist/materialist is going to have a hard time justifying his adherence to the moral prescriptions and proscriptions that most of us, theist and atheist alike, accept.  I would argue that a naturalist/physicalist/materialist ought to be a moral nihilist, and that when these types fight shy of moral nihilism that merely shows an inability or unwillingness on their part to appreciate the logical consequences of their own doctrine, or else some sort of psychological compartmentalization. 

I once knew a hard-assed logical positivist who during the work week practiced his positivism, but on Sundays attended Eastern Orthodox religious services.  He avoided cognitive dissonance by compartmentalizing.

The compartmentalized life is the suboptimal life.  Seek existential unity and consistency.

The Limits of Secularism

Call it synchronicity if you like, but a Port Angeles reader points me to this article by Rabbi Lord Sacks which complements the article by Theroux to which I linked in the previous post.  Excerpt:

So there it is: the evidence that intellectuals have systematically misunderstood the nature of religion and religious observance and have constantly been thinking, for the better part of three centuries, that religion was about to disappear, yet it hasn't. In certain parts of the world it is growing. The 21st century is likely to be a more religious century than the 20th. It is interesting that religion is particularly growing in places like China where the economy is growing.

We must ask ourselves why this is, because it is actually very odd indeed. Think about it: every function that was once performed by religion can now be done by something else. In other words, if you want to explain the world, you don't need Genesis; you have science. If you want to control the world, you don't need prayer; you have technology. If you want to prosper, you don't necessarily seek God's blessing; you have the global economy. You want to control power, you no longer need prophets; you have liberal democracy and elections.

If you're ill, you don't need a priest; you can go to a doctor. If you feel guilty, you don't have to confess; you can go to a psychotherapist instead. If you're depressed, you don't need faith; you can take a pill. If you still need salvation, you can go to today's cathedrals, the shopping centres of Britain — or as one American writer calls them, weapons of mass consumption. Religion seems superfluous, redundant, de trop. Why then does it survive?

My answer is simple. Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.

I came to a similar conclusion in Why Science Will Never Put Religion Out of Business.

Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance.  Vouchsafed a hint of what might have been a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating.  That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding.

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of  the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously.  And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical.  But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating — that puzzles me.

So maybe some things human are foreign to me after all.

Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos

Mt Athos Back in April, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos.  It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from libs and lefties and the lamestream media is religion-bashing — unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace – but the segment in question was refreshingly objective.  It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough.  It didn't raise the underlying questions.  Which is why you need my blog.

 

We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real.  For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though  philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality.  We don't know that there is any world other than this one.  We also don't know that there isn't.  Now here is an existential question for you:  Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinterworld?  The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not.  It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is.  When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond. 

Let us be clear what the existential option is.  It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites.  It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death.  (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend.  I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)

The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions.  They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females – there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.

Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being?  Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life?  The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth.  Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz.  There is a definite logic to their position.  If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters.  The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question. 

This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.'  Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it."  Marx and the Commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means.   Buddha was famously opposed to speculation.  If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow.  The logic is the same, though the point is different.  The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, extinguishment of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara. 

If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then  by all means live in accordance with it.  Put it into practice.  But do you in fact have the truth?  For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded.  If the monks of Mt Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.

But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions?  There is of course a secular analog.  I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions.  They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible.  Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example.  Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up  enablers of  great evil.  In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.

So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being?  For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously.  I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry.  The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it.   But that can't come this side of the Great Divide.  Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize.  We can rest in dogma on the far side.

My Athenian thesis — that the life of thephilosopher is the highest life possible for a human being — won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have doubts about it.  But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise.  For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.