Category: Religion

Buddhism, Suffering, and One Reason I am not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that all is unsatisfactory?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why? 

Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   If it were fully satisfactory, why would you be inclined to repeat the pleasure? Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit, bad infinity.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had.  One also suffers when the satisfaction sought is achieved but revealed to be less than what one expected.

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected and inordinate; the problem is desire itself.  The solution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root (radix) of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated).  It is a radical solution.

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' — to hazard an oxymoron — the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent. It brings the meta-physical or super-sensible to bear in the evaluation of the physical or sensible.   Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real, truly important, and truly satisfactory. But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I question both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is arguably faulty because arguably incoherent: it presupposes while denying the existence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be its own self-extinction.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.  These other doctrines are inseparable from the doctrine of suffering, and they, like it, have a radical meaning. It is not just that things change, but that they are in Heraclitean flux.  It is an observable fact that things change, but the nature of change cannot be 'read off' from the fact of change.  Is change Heraclitean or Aristotelian?  If the former, then everything is continuously changing; if the latter, then there are enduring substrata of change which, for a time at least, do not change: one and the same avocado is first unripe and then ripe.  Neither of these views of change is empirically obvious in the way that it is empirically obvious that there is change.

Now it is radical impermanence that underpins radical unsatisfactoriness and that also implies the doctrine of anatta, which, in Western terms, is the denial of the existence of  substances. This denial, too, is radical since it is not merely the denial that substances are permanent, but a denial that there are any substances at all. 

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously –except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

Is Buddhism a Religion?

Julius Evola in The Doctrine of Awakening, pp. 9-10, states unequivocally,

. . . Buddhism — referring always to original [Pali] Buddhism — is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies supernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding our relationship with this reality that we know more or less as 'religion.'

What he means is that there is a strong tendency in the West to identify religion with faith-based religion, and that Buddhism is not a religion in this sense, based as it is on knowledge and direct insight, not faith or revelation.

. . . Dahlke sums up the matter, saying that one characteristic of Western superficiality is the tendency always to identify religion as a whole with religion based on faith.14 [P. Dahlke, Buddhismus als Religion und Moral (Munich and Neubiberg, 1923, p. 11) Beyond those who "believe" are those who "know," and to these the purely "mytho­logical" character of many simply religious, devotional, and even scholastically theo­logical concepts is quite clear. It is largely a question of different degrees of knowl­edge. Religion, from religo, is, as the word itself indicates, a reconnecting and, more specifically, a reconnecting of a creature to a Creator with the eventual introduction of a mediator or of an expiator. On the basis of this central idea can be built up a whole system of faith, devotion, and even mysticism that, admittedly, is capable of carrying an individual to a certain level of spiritual realization. However, it does so to a large extent passively since it is based essentially on sentiment, emotion, and suggestion. In such a system no amount of scholastic explaining will ever completely resolve the irrational and sub-intellectual element. (p. 9)

Summing up, we can say that pure Buddhism is a 'religion' without faith, revelation, sentiment, emotion, or devotion.  Alternatively, if those features are deemed essential to religion, then Buddhism is not a religion. 

We can easily understand that in some cases such "religious" forms are neces­sary; and even the East, in later periods, has known something of the kind, for instance, the way of devotion-bhakti-marga (from bhaj, "to adore")-of Ramānuja and certain forms of the Sakti cult: but we must also realize that there may be some who have no need of them and who, by race and by calling, desire a way free from "religious" mythologies, a way based on clear knowledge, realization, and awaken­ing. An ascetic, whose energies are employed in this direction, achieves the highest form of ascesis; and Buddhism gives us an example of an ascesis that is outstanding of its kind – -in saying "of its kind" we wish to point out that Buddhism represents a great historical tradition with texts and teachings available to all; it is not an esoteric school with its knowledge reserved for a restricted number of initiates.

For some, the spiritual quest is impossible without devotion and such accessories as pictorial representations such as icons along with other sensory aids including bodily postures (kneeling, etc.), gestures (sign of the cross, etc.) incense, candles, medals, water, ashes, oil, bread, and wine all appropriately sanctified within the context of simple or elaborate rites. Thus ordinary water, appropriately blessed by a priest, becomes 'holy water' and ordinary bread and wine, at the moment of consecration in the Catholic mass, undergoes transubstantiation into the body and blood of Christ.  For Buddhism, this is all in the end "mythological," including the subtle logic-chopping and dialectical maneuvers involved in the scholastic theology of transubstantiation.  Discursive prayer and other devotional practices may be necessary for some to make spiritual progress, but they can become a distraction and a form of superstition.  The Ultimate Realization lies beyond all of these 'bhaktic' or devotional practices and of course it lies beyond all theological dialectics.  And even if there is realm beyond this gross realm, a subtler realm which we will enter at death, that would only be a higher level of samsara and not nirvana, the ultimate goal of Realization. 

In this sense we can, and indeed we must, state that Buddhism — referring always to original Buddhism-is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies su­pernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding one's relationship with this reality that we know more or less as "religion." The validity of these statements would in no way be altered were one to set out in greater detail to defend the excellence of the theistic point of view against Bud­dhism, by charging the Doctrine of Awakening with more or less declared atheism. This brings us to the second point for discussion, but which we need only touch upon here as it is dealt with at length later in this work.

The atheism of the Buddhist is not the crass atheism of the materialistic worldling devoid of spiritual depth and spiritual aspiration. The atheism of the Buddhist is the denial that  any God, even the ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas could be the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Ultimate.  This, I take it, is logically compatible with the belief that there are gods and even a unique God in higher samsaric realms this side of the Absolute.

We have admitted that a "religiously" conceived system can carry an individual to a certain level of spiritual realization. The fact that this system is based on a theistic concept determines this level. The theistic concept, however, is by no means either unique or even the highest "religious" relationship such as the Hindu bhakti or the predominant faiths in the Western or Arab world. Whatever one may think of it, the theistic concept represents an incomplete view of the world, since it lacks the extreme hierarchic apex. From a metaphysical and (in the higher sense) traditional point of view, the notion on which theism is based of representing "being" in a per­sonal form even when theologically sublimated, can never claim to be the ultimate ideal. The concept and the realization of the extreme apex or, in other words, of that which is beyond both such a "being " and its opposite, "nonbeing," was and is natural to the Aryan spirit. It does not deny the theistic point of view but recognizes it in its rightful hierarchic place and subordinates it to a truly transcendental concept.

We are being told that theism is an incomplete worldview because "it lacks the extreme hierarchic apex."  Theism doesn't go all the way to the top. Even if  God is self-subsisting Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, as on the rarefied conception of Aquinas, which is beyond the prevalent 'God is a being among beings' conception, there is something still higher in the hierarchy, namely 'something' which is beyond Being and Nonbeing. The God of Aquinas is. He is an ens, even if he is also esse.  He is also a personal being. The Absolutely Unconditioned, however, is beyond personality and impersonality as it is beyond Being and Nonbeing.  God is not denied by Buddhism, but placed below the ultimately transcendent.

It is freely admitted that things are less simple than they seem in Western theol­ogy, especially in the realm of mysticism, and more particularly where it is con­cerned with so-called "negative theology." Also in the West the notion of a personal God occasionally merges into the idea of an ineffable essence, of an abysmal divin­ity, as the έν conceived by the Neoplatonists beyond the όν, as the Gottheit in the neuter beyond the Gott, which, after Dionysius the Areopagite, appeared frequently in German mysticism and which exactly corresponds with the neuter Brahman above the theistic Brahmā of Hindu speculation. But in the West it is more a notion wrapped in a confused mystical cloud than a precise doctrinal and dogmatic definition conforming to a comprehensive cosmic system. And this notion, in point of fact, has had little or no effect on the "religious" bias prevalent in the Western mind: its only result has been to carry a few men, confused in their occasional intuitions and visions, beyond the frontiers of "orthodoxy."

Evola's point seems basically correct: the negative theology of the mystics never became mainstream in the way that Aquinas's conception became mainstream in the Catholic church. 

That very apex that Christian theology loses in a confused background is, instead, very often placed consciously in the foreground by the Aryo-Oriental tradi­tions. To talk in this respect of atheism or even of pantheism betrays ignorance, an ignorance shared by those who spend their time unearthing oppositions and anti-theses. The truth is that the traditions of the Aryans who settled in the East retain and conserve much of what the later traditions of races of the same root who settled in the West have lost or no longer understand or retain only fragmentarily. A contributing factor here is the undoubted influence on European faiths of concepts of Semitic and Asiatic-Mediterranean origin. Thus to accuse of atheism the older traditions, particularly the Doctrine of Awakening, and also other Western traditions that re­flect the same spirit, only betrays an attempt to expose and discredit a higher point of view on the part of a lower one: an attempt that, had circumstances been reversed, would have been qualified out of hand by the religious West as Satanic. And, in fact, we shall see that it was exactly thus that it appeared to the doctrine of the Buddha (cf. p. 85-86).

The recognition of that which is "beyond both 'being' and 'nonbeing'" opens to ascetic realization possibilities unknown to the world of theism. The fact of reaching the apex, in which the distinction between "Creator" and "creature" becomes metaphysically meaningless, allows of a whole system of spiritual realizations that, since it leaves behind the categories of "religious" thought, is not easily understood: and, above all, it permits a direct ascent, that is, an ascent up the bare mountainside, without support and without useless excursions to one side or another. This is the exact meaning of the Buddhist ascesis; it is no longer a system of disciplines de-signed to generate strength, sureness, and unshakable calm, but a system of spiritual realization.

Buddhism — and again later we shall see this distinctly — carries the will for the unconditioned to a limit that is almost beyond the imagination of the modem Westerner. And in this ascent beside the abyss the climber rejects all "mythologies," he proceeds by means of pure strength, he ignores all mirages, he rids himself of any residual human weakness, he acts only according to pure knowledge. Thus the Awak­ened One (Buddha), the Victor (Jina) could be called he whose way was unknown to men, angels, and to Brahma himself (the Sanskrit name for the theistic god). Admit­tedly, this path is not without dangers, yet it is the path open to the virile mind-viriya-magga. The texts clearly state that the doctrine is "for the wise man, the expert, not for the ignorant, the inexpert." The simile of the cutting grass is used: "As kusa grass when wrongly grasped cuts the hand, so the ascetic life wrongly practised leads to infernal torments."' The simile of the serpent is used: "As a man who wants serpents goes out for serpents, looks for serpents, and finding a powerful serpent grasps it by the body or by the tail; and the serpent striking at him bites his hand or arm or other part so that he suffers death or mortal anguish-and why is this? Because he wrongly grasped the serpent-so there are men who are harmed by the doctrines. And why is this? Because they wrongly grasped the doctrines.'

It must be thus quite clear that the Doctrine of Awakening is not itself one particular religion that is opposed to other religions.

In sum, Buddhism on Evola's account is neither crassly atheistic nor crassly antireligious: it does not deny  supersensible Transcendence.  But this Transcendence is not a personal creator God who reveals himself to man, his creature, but the Unconditioned Absolute the ultimate path to which is not the path of faith and devotion but the path whereby one seeks to realize the Unconditioned Absolute in one's own consciousness by finally overcoming every duality of the discursive intellect.

Two Guises of Religion

Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings wallow in it.

Religion must remain a riddle here below, as much of a riddle as the predicament it is supposed to cure.  If religion wants a symbol, let it be:

Rx_symbol

And if anyone should say that only the sick need medicine, then let the reply be:  We are all sick.

Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:

If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.

These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible  that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness. 

("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.) 

The Attitude of the Worldling

Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality.  I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.   

For a worldling such as Alain,  the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!  Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon.  Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  No. So the will comes into it.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.

Alain (Emile Chartier)

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.

Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief

This just in from Karl White:
A couple of questions.
 
1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.
 
Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike 'potential.'
 
So in your view does that imply that there is no amount of evil that could rule it out? If the entire planet were like Auschwitz would that still not rule it out? (And it is estimated that roughly 150 million animals are slaughtered per day for human consumption, so it could plausibly be maintained that for animals the world is a kind of Auschwitz.)
 
No. The idea is that the existence of evils that are necessary for a greater good are logically compatible with the existence of an all-good God. So the goods have to outweigh the evils.  It follows that there has to be a limit to how much evil there is.
 
And let's leave out of the present discussion the human slaughter of humans and animals, for that belongs under the rubric 'moral evil,' whereas the topic under discussion is natural evil. One question for a separate post is whether natural evil is itself a species of moral evil, namely, the evil perpetrated by fallen angels. But for now I will assume that natural evil is not a species of moral evil; I will assume that it is not the result of free agency.
 
To put it more formally: is there any state of affairs, call it X, that would rule out the existence of God?
 
Yes. Just one case of pointless or unjustified evil would rule out the existence of God.
 
I am uncomfortable with the idea of saying yes, as I suspect it pushes the notion of an omni-God toward the brink of meaninglessness. We generally think that if a proposition cannot be proven or disproven then it is in a certain sense meaningless or at best useless. The Theist will reply that the existence of God is a unique case and fine, but I still feel that we are within our rights to ask for some form of verification without having the whole concept of God becoming meaningless.
 
I rather doubt that  a proposition is meaningful iff it is verifiable. Consider the following proposition
 
a) My grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on 1 January 1940.
 
By Bivalence, (a) is either true, or if not true, then false.  And this is so even though it is impossible now to determine (a)'s truth value.  Since (a) must either be true or false, it must be meaningful, despite its unverifiability.  Similarly for 
 
b) The execution of Sophie Scholl (of White Rose fame) was not a pointless evil.
 
(b) is meaningful but not empirically verifiable in the present life.
 
Note also, that if one is a verificationist, there is no need to mess around with the problem of evil: one can put paid to all (synthetic) claims about God, such as the claim that God exists, by maintaining that they are meaningless because not empirically verifiable in the here and now.
 
2. You push the pragmatic, Pascalian line about the benefits of believing in God quite regularly. But isn't there a sort of question-begging to this, in that it assumes only beneficial consequences? What if someone reads the Quran, sees the lines about killing non-believers and thinks "I may as well, because if God exists, he'll reward me, and if he doesn't, it doesn't matter anyway." Or if someone adopts a religion that promotes the total subjection of women?
 
My Pascalianism is not blanket; it kicks in only in specific circumstances.  Islam is "the poorest and saddest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), It is clearly an inferior religion as compared to Christianity (morally if not metaphysically) if it (Islam) is a religion at all as opposed to a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a Christian heresy (Chesterton).  It was founded by a warrior who was arguably a fraud and it enjoins immoral practices such the genital mutilation of girls, the subjection of women, and the slaughter of 'infidels.' . So if one exercises due doxastic diligence one excludes Islam and other pseudo-religions from the Pascalian option.
 
The Pascalian move is made in a situation like the following.  One is a serious and sensitive human being who cares about his ultimate felicity.  One is alive to the vanity of this world. One is psychologically capable of religious belief and appreciates that God and the soul are Jamesian live options. One is intellectually sophisticated enough to know that God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. One appreciates that not to choose to live as if God and the soul are real is to choose to live as if they are not real.  One understands that it is prudentially irrational to suspend judgment.  At this point the Pascalian reasoning kicks in.
 
By the way, my Pascalian move is merely reminiscent of he great Pascal; I am not concerned with accuracy to the details of his view.  I write as a kind of 'existentialist.' What matters is how I live here and now and what helps me here and now.  I borrow what is useful and appropriable by me here and now; I am not committed to the whole Pascalian kit-and-kaboodle.

More on Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil with Responses to Caiati and Pollack

Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies:

In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem.” This is precisely the sort of help that you have provided me, and I sincerely thank you it. I have struggled with the problem of animal pain and suffering most of my life, and it has long poked into my theistic beliefs like a sharp thorn. In considering the empirical fact of the baby elephant’s atrocious death, I now see that I assumed what instinctively horrified me was objectively evil and hence pointlessly evil. I now understand that, although I continue to hate the empirical fact, this assumption is unwarranted.

I am fortunate to have attracted Dr. Caiati as a correspondent.  The attraction of the like-minded is one of the beauties of blog. The formulation in the penultimate sentence above, however, is not quite right.  If a state of affairs is objectively evil, it does not follow that it is pointlessly evil. It may or may not be. As I see it, the pointlessly evil is a proper subset of the objectively evil. Everything pointlessly evil is objectively evil, but not conversely. Evils can be justified by greater goods that they subserve. They remain evils, however,  even if justified. It could be — it is possible for all we know — that predation is justified by a greater good unattainable without predation.  And this is so whether or not we can know, or even imagine, what this greater good might be. The main point here is that there is reason to doubt whether an event or a state of affairs that is  objectively evil is also pointlessly evil.  

The following two propositions cannot both be true:

1) God (defined in terms of the standard omni-attributes) exists.

2) Pointless (unjustified, gratuitous) evils exist.

So if (2) is true, then (1) is false. But how do we know that (2) is true? Is (2) true? What the skeptical theist will point out is that we cannot directly and validly infer (2) from

3) Objective evils exist.

This allows the theist 'doxastic wiggle room.'   He is not rationally compelled to abandon theism in the face of (3). (1) and (3) can both be true.  And this is so even if I cannot explain how it is possible that they both be true.

Vito continues:

I had thought to place my instinctive reaction on a different plane than St. Paul’s declaration that one can see “that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the things that have been made,” in that the latter involves a two stage intellectual process, that of (1) the perception of an empirical fact, the existence and nature of the universe, and (2) the attribution of this fact to the action of some conscious cause, that is, to the action of a predefined concept of a Creator God, as understood in the Judaic and early Christian traditions. In the case of the baby elephant, I believed that the additive [additional] conceptual stage was not involved, since my emotional reaction was akin to what most of humanity feels when encountering a horrendous evil, such as a pointless cruelty or murder. In other words, I took it as an instinctive moral reaction that preceded any conceptualization. As such, I assumed that its source was inherent in my moral essence as a man and hence prior to discursive argument. From what you write, I now see that I was probably wrong in making this assumption, since the empirical event gives me only the right to my emotional reaction and not to any larger philosophical claims as to the nature of God that I would care to derive from it.

Vito understands me quite well.

To give the Pauline two-step a Kantian twist: I am filled with wonder by "the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." That is the first step.  The second step is to infer straightaway that there must be a transcendent Creator of the universe who is also the Source of the moral law within me.  One can reasonably doubt the validity of that immediate inference.  (And if you try to mediate it by the adducing of some further proposition, then the skeptic will train his sights upon that proposition.) By the same token, one can reasonably doubt that the extremely strong, pervasive, and obtrusive appearance of unjustified natural evil is a veridical appearance, and thus that the objective evil of predation is a pointless or unjustified evil.

Malcolm Pollack, responding to my first response to Caiati, and targeting my claim that in the end one must decide what to believe and how to live, writes:

"One must decide.” Well, yes — but how? Bill shows us that reason alone has insufficient grounds for a verdict; neither case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Upon what do we fall back, then? [. . .]

So — if reason is helpless to acquit, and conscience votes to convict, then what is left for the believer? Only the persistence of his sense of the transcendent, and the yearning to believe. If we are to let God off the hook, the problem of “pointless evil” must simply be set aside as a mystery beyond our comprehension. Can we do it? Ought we do it?

I am not sure that Malcolm understands quite what I mean when I say that "one must decide what to believe" in the final analysis and with respect to a matter like this. He wants to how one decides. Answer: You just do it after having reviewed all the considerations pro et contra.  It's a free decision. There is no algorithm.  There is no decision procedure that one can mechanically follow. The considerations pro and con do not decide the matter. What you "fall back upon" is is your own free choice to either believe that (1) or to believe that (2). You stop thinking and perform an act of will. Thought is endless and its conclusions are inconclusive. Thought goes around and around.  To take a stand one must jump of the merry-go-round.

"But isn't that arbitrary?" Of course, in one sense of 'arbitrary.' But not in the sense of being random or uninformed by rational considerations pro and con that precede the decision. The necessity of action, the necessity of an abrupt shift from the plane of thought to the plane of action, ought to dawn on one once one sees that (i) one must act, and that (ii) reasons, taken singly or collectively, do not necessitate a course of action.  This is most obvious when one is in a state of 'doxastic equipoise,' that situation in which the considerations pro and the considerations con cancel out.  But even if one set of reasons strikes one as stronger than the other, opposing, set, one still has to stop thinking and decide to act on the stronger set of reasons. For if one continues thinking, one will almost certainly modify if not reject one's initial assessment.

There are all these considerations that speak for God and all these others ones that speak against God, the loudest being those having to do with evil.  The Leibnizian "Gentlemen, let us calculate" cuts no ice in a situation like this.  As I said, there is no algorithm. There is no rational procedure that does the work  for me.   The work is done by an act of will, informed, but not necessitated, by the reasons that  the intellect surveys.  It would be nice if there were reasons the contemplation of which would force me this way or that in a matter like the one before us. The truth, however, is that I am forced, not to believe this or that, but to take responsibility for what I believe whatever it is.

Seeing as how I cannot achieve the fixation of belief by continuing to mull over reasons pro and con, I achieve said fixation by an act of will.

"Why not suspend belief?"  One is free to do that, of course. One might just take no position on the question whether God exists or not and whether there are pointless evils or not.  But the taking of no position is itself a free decision. One decides not to decide. Not to decide is to decide. Now this might be theoretically reasonable, but for beings like us, interested (inter esse)  beings,  this is practically and prudentially unreasonable.

Consider the question of the existence of the (immortal) soul. Can one prove its existence? No. Can one prove its nonexistence? No. Are there good arguments on both sides? Yes. Is the cumulative case on the one side stronger than the cumulative case on the other? Possibly. But you still have to decide what you will believe in this matter and how you will live. 

Suppose you decide to suspend judgment and forget about the whole matter. You will then live as if there is no (immortal) soul and not attend to its care or worry about its future well-being.  You will not have committed yourself theoretically, but you will have committed yourself existentially. Should the soul prove to exist, then you will have acted imprudently.  You will have acted in a prudentially irrational way.

If, on the other hand, you live as if God and the soul are real, and it turns out that they are not, what have you lost?  Nothing of any value comparable to the value of what you will gain if God and the soul turn out to be real and you lived in the belief that they are real. I put this question to an atheist a while back and he replied, "You lost your intellectual integrity."  Not so!  For both belief and unbelief are rationally acceptable.  

So I will say the following to Malcolm.  Not everyone is psychologically capable of religious belief, but if you are, and if you agree that it could be the case for all we know that God and the soul are real, and that the pro arguments have weight even f they are not rationally compelling, then I say: go ahead and believe and act in accordance with the beliefs.  What harm could it do?

And it might make you a better man.  For example, if you believe that you will be judged post-mortem for what you did and left undone in this life, then this belief might contribute to your being a better man than you would have been without this belief — even if the belief  turns out to be false.   Religion does not have to be true to be life-enhancing and conducive to human flourishing.  If, however, you believe it not to be true, then you won't live in accordance with it, and it will not have any life-enhancing effect.

Vows

Vows make for stability of life in a changeful world. But change is sometimes improvement, and this includes change in belief. The vows that stabilized can come to cramp and confine. Doubt sets in and commitment wanes. Fervent belief becomes lukewarm. A monk like Merton can come to wonder whether he has thrown his life away in world-flight.

And so we bang up against another 'interesting ' problem. To live well one must have firm beliefs and fixed commitments. But one must also avoid rigidity and dogmatism. One must see to it that rigor mentis does not become rigor mortis. One must find the middle course between rudderless drift on the high seas of uncertainty and blinkered fixation on a 'safe harbor' the attainment of which would be shipwreck on a reef.

Islam as religion’s most virulent subspecies?

I agree with the gist of Claude Boisson's statement below (via e-mail) who takes minor issue with what he quotes me as saying in the header, turning my declarative into an interrogative. (I haven't checked all his factual statements.) I myself have referred to Islam as a 'hybrid' ideology: it is as much a political ideology as it is a religion.  It is a terrible threat to the West and its values, and it speaks volumes about the Left that leftists refuse to see this.
 
I would rather say that Islam corresponds to an *intersection* between “religion” (as we understand it) and politics, law, etiquette, etc. This is in fact what ulamas have always taught, and they consider this fact as a proof of Islam’s superiority over, in particular, Christianity, a mere religion. 
 
That is why we have the recently revived traditional Arabic phrase “al-dīn wa al-dawla”, the religion and the state. This is what Islam actually is, not a mere dīn. 
 
Hence, for example, the following facts, otherwise uninterpretable:
 
(1) The Islamic era does not begin with, say, Muhammad’s first revelation in the cave on mount Hira in 610 AD, but with the Hegira in 622, the flight from Mecca (where he was not very successful as a “spiritual” leader) to Medina. There Muhammad, already a prophet, became additionally a social, political and (ruthless) military leader and a lawgiver for the Umma, the community. Islam is thus a Gesamtkunstwerk, not simply what we term a religion. 
 
(2) The Islamic scriptures (the Sunna very considerably more than the Qur’an) are full of “lay” rules which seem very strange to the followers of many other religions: a man should urinate holding his penis with his left hand; Muhammad (the beautiful model that the muslimin should imitate) disliked onions, dogs, salamanders, musical instruments; these are the rules for dividing the spoils in warfare, etc.
 
(3) I have collected a list of no fewer than 27 mosques in 15 countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, bearing the name of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the most celebrated of the Muslim generals who conquered Hispania starting in 711. There are notably 2 such mosques in Spain(!), one in Gibraltar (the mountain is named after Tariq), 2 in France, 2 in Belgium, 1 in Germany. This is as odd as if one had Christian religious services in the “Cathédrale Bonaparte” (he invaded Egypt) or a Catholic church named after one of the French generals who defeated Muslim armies in the conquest of Algeria in the 19th c., or Italian churches bearing the name of Italian generals who fought in Libya. 
 

Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist

Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192:

Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power.

I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances.

Britton KarlThe first assurance might be thought to be  not specifically religious, or at least not theistically-religious. There might be — it is epistemically possible that there are — objective and absolute moral distinctions without God.  I hope we can agree that the wanton slaughter of human beings for one's sexual gratification is absolutely wrong: wrong always and everywhere and in every possible circumstance in which there are human beings. Take that as an example of an objectively true moral proposition. Think of propositions in a Platonic or quasi-Platonic sort of way, as subsisting independently of minds, including God's mind if a divine mind there be, and thus as belonging to a realm unto themselves apart from the realm of space, time and matter. It might then be thought that the indicative proposition just stated suffices to ground the imperative, "Thou shalt not wantonly slaughter, etc."

Is there a Platonic realm of agential oughts and ought-nots that subsist independently of mind and matter and that suffice to make it morally impermissible to, say, rape and murder for pleasure and morally obligatory to, say, feed and care for one's children?  And all of this without a foundation in a divine intellect and will?

Perhaps; I can't prove the opposite.  My metaphysical hunch, however, is that such Platonic moral propositions, and not just moral propositions,  cannot 'hang in the air': they need support in a mind. That's my hunch, and I can articulate it rigorously in argumentative form. No argument in metaphysics in support of a substantive proposition, however, no matter how rigorously deployed, is rationally compelling. So none of my arguments will be rationally compelling. I can render my hunch reasonable, but I cannot force you to accept it on pain of your being taxed with irrationality should you not accept it.

Nevertheless,  I say we need God to ground the existence of moral absolutes. Britton says as much when he says that the absolute good has power.  For if the absolute good has power, then the absolute good is God.

Suppose you disagree.  Free-floating Platonica suffice, you say. It is enough that there subsist in Plato's topos ouranos an entire system of such propositions as Wanton slaughter of innocents for sexual gratification is wrong and Caring for one's offspring is morally obligatory.   The latter prescribes an ought-to-do, a moral must.  Who enforces it? If no one does, then it is an entirely impotent ought.  If we mortals sometimes enforce it, then the ought is not wholly impotent: we provide the power to enforce the moral imperatives that follow from moral declaratives.

Could a moral ought be wholly powerless?  Could it be true that one ought to X and oufht to refrain from Y even if there are no consequences in the realm of fact when the prescriptions and proscriptions are violated?  Could the Ideal and the Real, the Normative and the Factual subsist in such separation? Could Being be so bifurcated?

Would the moral law be the moral law were it never enforced? Enforcement is the bringing to bear of the Ideal upon the Real.

Consider the case of a philosophically sophisticated rapist. It is his pleasure to hunt women and have his way with them. He finds one in an isolated place where she cannot summon help. She pleads and protests: Rape is wrong! He admits that it is wrong.  He gives a little speech:

Yes, it is true, absolutely true, that rape is objectively morally wrong. It is wrong in Plato's heaven, but here we are on earth where there is nothing to prevent me from raping you. I am strong and you are weak.  I can and will satisfy my raging desire.  I have no reason not to. For my raping you will entail no negative consequences for me. I will make sure of that by strangling you while I rape you.  The dead tell no tales.  I will not offer the pseudo-justification that might makes right, that what I am about to do to you is morally permissible because I have the power to do it.   A right that might makes is no right at all. Might cannot make right. 'Might makes right' is eliminativism about right, not an identification of its essence. No such Thrasymachean sophistry for me. What I am about to do to you is not right, but wrong.  But the wrongness of the deeds I am about to do has no relevance  to what actually happens in this material world of fact where we find ourselves. It is a wrongness that subsists in Plato's heaven, but not here in the sublunary. The wrongness is neither here nor there. 

Why should I care that rape and murder are wrong? I am not saying that they are not wrong; I am admitting that they are. I am saying that it doesn't matter in the real world.  Why should I act morally in circumstances in which there are no negative consequences for me if I act immorally?  Will you tell me that I must act morally because it is the morally right thing to do?  That I ought to do right because it is right?  Why? There is no God and no post-mortem regard or punishment.  There is no enforcer of the right and there will be no one upon whom to enforce it.  I grant you your Platonic moral absolutes, but they hang in the air, and in a tw0-fold sense: no God supports them in their existence, and no God enforces them in the phenomenal order.  My final happiness does not depend on doing the morally right thing in those circumstances in which I can get away with doing the wrong thereby satisfying my lust for power, pleasure, and domination. Now take off your clothes!

My view is that something like God is necessary both to explain the existence of the Platonic moral absolutes and their relevance to our animal life here below.  We need God both as support and as enforcer.  Being is One. It is not so bifurcated that the Ideal and the Real are poles apart without communication. God bridges the gap and mediates the opposites.  He brings about the mutual adjustment of virtue and happiness, to borrow a Kantian formulation. But why do we need God to do this job?  Because we cannot do it all by ourselves. A truly just adjustment of virtue and happiness cannot occur for most in this life.

If the absolute good does not have (absolute) power, then the absolute good is 'neither here nor there' in both senses of this phrase.

Too Late by Five Months! Remembering Robert C. Coburn

This morning I happened to re-read the chapter "Metaphysical Theology and the Life of Faith" in Robert C. Coburn's, The Strangeness of the Ordinary (Rowman and Littlefield, 1990). I first read it in May of 1997.  I was so impressed with it this second time around that I resolved to send Professor Coburn a note of appreciation. But I logged on only to find his obituary. I reproduce it below the fold to save it from the folly and poor judgment of librarians and webmasters.  Too late by five months!

Permalinks ought to be permanent, or at least approximate unto the sublunary 'permanence' of that which, under the aspect of eternity, is impermanent. 

And it testifies to the poor judgment of librarians that my copy of Coburn's book is a library discard. I was going to tell Coburn that story and praise him for his flawless prose that displays the erudition of a technical philosopher wedded to the deep humanity of a serious truth seeker.  As academic philosophy succumbs to leftist infestation, and the humanities dissolve into politically correct nonsense, people of Coburn's depth and breadth of learning are unlikely to be replaced.

Note to Vito C.: you will profit from reading the chapter in question. See if you can find the book in a library. You can access a copy of the chapter's article precursor online, but the fee is ridiculous. If you want, I will send you a photocopy, gratis, if you send me by e-mail your preferred mailing address.

Continue reading “Too Late by Five Months! Remembering Robert C. Coburn”

Does Everyone Have a Religion? Even Atheists?

Andrew Sullivan opines,

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. [. . .]

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion.

Sully is not being specific enough. Consider Communist ideology. It is a practice, not just a theory. It is a way of life that gives meaning. It appeals to values that transcend the current situation such as the value of a classless society free of exploitation and alienation, a society with no need of the illusory consolations of religion, a society in which that opiate will not be needed because each will realize himself to the fullest in the here and now. Pie here below will obviate the hankering for pie in the sky. It is easy to see how so many millions in the 20th century could be recruited to the Communist cause. 

On Sully's definition, godless communism is a religion that rejects religion, which is to say: it is not a religion on any appropriate understanding of that term. Sully's definition is not specific enough, sullied as it is by being too broad.

Sullivan ought to say something sensible. I suggest the following. Human beings have very strong worldview needs.  Doxastic security needs, I call them. It is impossible not to have some worldview or other, tacit or explicit, unexamined or examined, uncritically imbibed from one's social environment or worked out for oneself. No human being lives, or can live, adoxastos, without beliefs, and in particular without action-guiding beliefs, beliefs that direct, as well as overarching beliefs that orient us in the scheme of things. Not even the Pyrrhonian can pull it off.

Now, in the genus worldview, distinguish two species: religious and non-religious.  Communism, being militantly atheistic and anti-religious, is a non-religious worldview. By contrast, Catholicism is a religious worldview.

At this point you ought to ask me for the specific difference.  If rationality is what distinguishes human from non-human animals,  what property or set of properties distinguishes religious from non-religious worldviews?  My answer in The Essence of Religion.

No good purpose is served by calling atheism a religion. It is a cheap piece of journalistic sloppiness too often maintained, too infrequently reflected upon.