{"id":9922,"date":"2012-02-21T15:02:09","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T15:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/02\/21\/an-example-of-a-religion-without-superstition\/"},"modified":"2012-02-21T15:02:09","modified_gmt":"2012-02-21T15:02:09","slug":"an-example-of-a-religion-without-superstition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/02\/21\/an-example-of-a-religion-without-superstition\/","title":{"rendered":"An Example of a Religion Without Superstition"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Pepple has written an excellent post<\/a> in which he sketches a religion free of superstitious elements, thereby showing that there is nothing in the nature of religion — assuming that religion has a nature — that requires that every religion be wholly or even in part superstitious.  Here is his sketch:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. God exists.<\/span>
2. Upon creating, God placed all sentient beings in heaven.<\/span>
3. Some of us sinned and were sent to our universe for punishment.<\/span>
4. There is no intervention by God in our universe, because that would interfere with the punishment.<\/span>
5. After we die, we either regain heaven or are reincarnated.<\/span>
6. We regain heaven not through worship of God but by good behavior, by treating other sentient beings right. In other words, we regain heaven by merit and not by grace.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I suggested  in Religion and Superstition<\/a>, the bare belief that there are supernatural beings is not superstitious.  Without essaying a logically impeccable definition of 'superstitious belief' (very difficult if not impossible), I would say that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of a belief's being superstitious is that it entail one or more erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of nature.  I have seen Catholic baseball players  make the sign of the cross before stepping up to the plate.  That bit of (disgusting) behavior is evidence of a superstitious belief:  clearly the gesture in question has no tendency to raise the probability of connecting with the ball.  Or consider the plastic dashboard Jesus that I mentioned before.    The belief that the presence of this hunk of plastic will ward off automotive mishap is superstitious, and a person who occurrently or dispositionally has many beliefs like this is a superstitious person.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what if the person believes, not that the piece of plastic will protect him, but that the purely spiritual person represented will protect him by intervening in nature?  That too is arguably superstitious, though not as egreuiously superstitious as the first belief.  One might argue like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

a. The physical domain is causally closed.<\/span>
b. The belief that Jesus will intervene in the workings of nature should one, say, have a blow-out is an erroneous belief about the physical domain.<\/span>
Ergo<\/span>
c. The belief in question is superstitious.<\/span><\/p>\n

To make things hard for the religionist  suppose we just assume the causal closure of the physical domain<\/strong>:  every event in the physical universe that has a cause has a physical cause, and every effect of a physical cause is a physical event.  The idea is that no causal influence can enter or exit the physical domain.  That the physical domain is causally closed is neither obvious nor a principle of physics.  It is a philosophical<\/em> thesis with all the rights, privileges, and debilities<\/em> pertaining thereunto.<\/span><\/p>\n

But even if causal closure is true, it doesn't rule out the existence of a wholly immaterial God who sustains the universe at every instant but never intervenes in its law-governed workings.  As far as Pepple and I can see there is nothing superstitious in the belief that such a God exists.  So there is nothing supersitious about Pepple's (1).<\/span><\/p>\n

I read his (2) as the claim that God creates purely spiritual beings who exist in a purely spiritual domain.  Please note that sentience does not entail having physical sense organs.  For example literal visual seeing does not require the existence of physical eyes. In out-of-body experiences, subjects typically have visual experiences that are not routed through the standard-issue optical transducers in their heads.  And yet they literally (and arguably veridically<\/em>) see physical things, e.g., the little bald spot on the top of a surgeon's head.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Ad (3).  How do we get sent into this penal colony of a world?  We are born into it: the preexistent soul begins to inhabit an animal organism.  Soul in this sense is of course not an Aristotleian animating principle or a Thomistic anima forma corporis<\/em>, but a Platonic soul.  But wouldn't the attaching of a pre-existent soul to an already living organism involve some violation of causal closure?  Not obviously.  But this is a deep question. (I now invoke the blogospheric privilege entailed by the 'Brevity is the soul of blog.')<\/span><\/p>\n

Pepple's is a rather 'thin' religion but I think it illustrates nicely how religion and superstition can be decoupled.  For his is a belief system that counts as a religion but is clearly not superstitious.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we need to make this really clear are definitions of 'religion' and 'superstition' ('pseudo-religion').  But definitions in this area are very difficult to come by.  And it may be that religion<\/em> and superstition<\/em> are both family-resemblance concepts that are insusceptible of rigorous definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions of application.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Pepple has written an excellent post in which he sketches a religion free of superstitious elements, thereby showing that there is nothing in the nature of religion — assuming that religion has a nature — that requires that every religion be wholly or even in part superstitious.  Here is his sketch: 1. God exists.2. … Continue reading “An Example of a Religion Without Superstition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,330],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-superstition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}