yet another secular humanist with all the answers
Archives for the month of: June, 2008
Those jokers at the Pew are at it again, as reported today in the NYTimes under the headline Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance. Here is the first paragraph.
Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
What does this mean?
“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists.”
No, Mike, that’s not what it means.
Look at that first paragraph again. A whole lot of people “believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation,” the survey found. How did it find this? Well, it asked. Here are the survey instructions, copied from Pew’s web site. (From the page linked here, click Beliefs & Practices, and then Views of One’s Religion as the One True Faith).
Question wording: [IF RESPONDENT HAS A RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION, ASK:] Now, as I read a pair of statements, tell me whether the FIRST statement or the SECOND statement comes closer to your own views even if neither is exactly right. First/next: My religion is the one, true faith leading to eternal life, OR: many religions can lead to eternal life.
Does anyone really think that the way to discover someone’s sincere thoughts regarding “eternal life” is to ask them this question? The epistemological and phenomenological obstacles to such a determination are practically infinite.
Here’s one. If I consider “eternal life” to be a real thing, I will probably have to admit that I am far from being able to understand its nature or how to get there. So I will probably have to trust my pastor to give me this information. I still won’t understand it–how can a poor sinner understand the deep structure of the Divine Plan?–but at least I’ll have some words I can say to people who ask. In this scenario, the Pew interviewer is getting a pastor’s opinion, recited second-hand, through the mouths of the congregation. I wonder how many of their respondents behaved this way. A third? Five eighths? Nine tenths?
Here’s another. There is no eternal life, so anything you think you understand about it is wrong. A person cannot have a coherent opinion about the requirements for the attainment of eternal life. You can’t find out anything, you can’t know anything about this topic, so if you say anything either you made it up, or you are repeating what someone else made up.
Why does this matter? Because Pew’s methodology reinforces a dangerous myth: the myth that one’s religious beliefs are to some extent a conscious choice. If my beliefs are deligerately chosen, you need to take care when you challenge them. You need to let me at least try to explain them, otherwise you’re being intolerant. But religious beliefs are not consciously chosen. Religious affiliation is chosen, and people change their affiliations surprisingly often. And whatever your affiliation, your pastor will tell you what to think about eternal life, the age of the Earth, whether God is male or female, and anything else you want to know. But you didn’t join his church because you found its cosmology to be correct. You joined because his church is across the street, and your friend Grace goes there, and everyone seems so nice.
This means that when the Pew Foundation asks you about your doctrinal opinions, they are asking you about something that sounds important but that you seldom think about. (And if you do think about it, your thoughts are guaranteed not to make any sense.)
To emphasize people’s “beliefs” in a survey like this is to distort the discussion about religion, because that’s not what religion is about. Religion is about money and power. The central question about religion in public life is not whether people are interested in being “tolerant” but why they are happy to pay their pastors so much in exchange for nothing more than pretty words to parrot to the Pew.
Roy Sablosky, 2008.
~2,000 words.
In April 2008, Edge.org published an article by Stuart Kauffman, Breaking the Galilean Spell, adapted from his forthcoming book, Reinventing the Sacred. Not having read the book, I am not sure what Kauffman’s conclusions or recommendations are, but his assumptions are quite wrong.
This response is structured as a long string of quotes from Kauffman’s article, with a comment following each one. The quotes are in their original order.
… Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. … [For the reductionist,] human choices, made by ourselves as human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings, ultimately to be explained by physics.
Of course they are all mere happenings–and of course they also have whatever meanings any human beings care to assign them. The idea that everything is, in principle, “ultimately to be explained by physics,” is in no way incompatible with human meanings, values, choices, or actions. This is a common misunderstanding. It has been meticulously debunked by Daniel Dennett–see, for example, Freedom Evolves.
Biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe.
Of course they are real. Who ever said otherwise?
A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.
Well, they are made of particles. This is beyond dispute. On the other hand, it is fair to say that they are “not mere particles.” But I don’t see what the problem is, exactly.
Some billions of us believe in an Abrahamic supernatural God, and some in the ancient Hindu gods. … About a billion of us are secular but bereft of our spirituality and reduced to being materialist consumers in a secular society.
Maybe you feel “bereft” and “reduced”–I sure don’t.
But I see, now, where the controversy came from that you are positioning yourself as knowing how to resolve. It came from religion, and it’s imaginary.
Religion says that secular science deliberately strips life of its meaning. But this is slander. Religion is anti-science, not the other way around. Science studies the world, ignoring religious concepts because they are false and spiritual concepts because they are not applicable. It is not inherently anti-religious or anti-spiritual. This is a myth, invented by religious apologists to demonize scientific thinking and therefore make religion less vulnerable to questioning.
If we the secular hold to anything it is to “humanism.” But humanism, in a narrow sense, is too thin to nourish us as human agents in the vast universe we partially cocreate. I believe we need a domain for our lives as wide as reality.
If you define humanism narrowly enough, it becomes “too thin to nourish.” Define it more liberally, and it is indeed “as wide as reality.”
With Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Laplace, reductionism began and continued its 350-year reign. Over the ensuing centuries, science and the Enlightenment have given birth to secular society.
Did they?–or did secular society gave birth to science and the Enlightenment?
Reductionistic physics has emerged for many as the gold standard for learning about the world.
Well, reductionistic physics is certainly the gold standard for learning about how matter is put together. But you are implying much more than that when you use the phrase “learning about the world.” You are, in effect, quoting the often-heard claim that “science is one way of learning about the world, and religion is another.” But surely you know that this is absurd. Science is a way of learning about the world; religion is a way of not learning about the world.
In turn, the growth of science has driven a wedge between faith and reason.
No, it has not. Religion is responsible for this “wedge.” We are dealing with the same myth as before: the religious myth that science threatens to destroy our spirituality. Science is no more opposed to spirituality than it is to poetry, or love. Most scientific work does not touch on these topics simply because they are not the topics in question. If you are studying superconductivity, or RNA, or metabolic pathways, spirituality is not relevant to your work. On the other hand, it is not forbidden. You can be as spiritual as you want to be, as a person, in your heart. No one’s stopping you. Contrary to the claims of religious apologists, there is no conflict between science and spirituality at all.
You have also left unexamined the background assumption that if one attacks religion one is also attacking spirituality, because religion equals spirituality. The truth is, no one who understands these two can confuse the one with the other.
Today the schism between faith and reason finds voice in the sometimes vehement disagreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who believe in a transcendent Creator God, and agnostic and atheist “secular humanists” who do not believe in a transcendent God. These divergent beliefs are profoundly held.
No, this is wrong and misleading. Some people believe in gods; others do not. But these are not “divergent beliefs.” I do not believe in any gods–which is not the same as believing that there are no gods. I have no beliefs regarding any gods. To say that a religious fundamentalist and I have divergent, profoundly held beliefs implies a symmetry between our views that does not exist. He has profoundly held beliefs (or so it would appear); I do not.
Furthermore, when we have “vehement disagreements” they are not over religious or spiritual matters. My not believing in their god is nothing like an attack on them; nor is their belief harmful to me. What makes us vehement is our different opinions regarding practical matters: whether it is legitimate, for example, to kill people who do not share one’s religious belief.
Indeed, the most serious disputes between the religious and the secular are all of this type. They arise when the religious are performing or advocating some sort of injury or coercion which we humanists know to be inhumane. We object to harm, not to belief.
[Reductionism] has dominated Western science at least since Galileo and Newton but leaves us in a meaningless world of facts devoid of values … .
Nonsense. Reductionism is not some immense force, like the Gulf Stream or American Idol. It’s just a rule of thumb that sometimes comes in handy when you’re trying to figure out how stuff works. Reductionism has not cast us into a meaningless world. It doesn’t have that kind of power.
We often turn to a Creator God to explain the existence of life.
Speak for yourself.
My claim is not simply that we lack sufficient knowledge or wisdom to predict the future evolution of the biosphere, economy, or human culture. It is that these things are inherently beyond prediction. Not even the most powerful computer imaginable can make a compact description in advance of the regularities of these processes. There is no such description beforehand. Thus the very concept of a natural law is inadequate for much of reality.
No, that does not follow.
Of course everything unfolds under natural law. That’s what ‘natural law’ means. Whether, given what natural laws we do know, we can predict the future is a different question. Limitations in our predictive powers do not invalidate the laws. The laws are there, and we know what some of them are. That we cannot wind them forward to see where every particle goes next does not prove them false.
Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe. It is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all.
You are conflating religion and spirituality, making both of them difficult to think about.
Here is the trick to thinking about religion: put your attention on the men at the top. Nothing happens in the religious sphere unless these men want it to happen. Without these men, there would be no religion, because it has no benefits for anyone but them.
Religious leaders will tell you that religion is a source of “awe, gratitude, and respect,” but this is an excuse. The overwhelming reason for the existence of religious organizations is that they provide a livelihood for their organizers. To recruit customers, the organization claims to possess a cornucopia of invaluable and irreplaceable products and services, but all they really have to sell is their beautiful bill of goods.
There are plenty of ways to find “awe, gratitude, and respect” in this world. Religion has no monopoly on such things–it does not even have special expertise. Religious leaders are not interested in insights, epiphanies, truth, people, or the world. They will implement the policies, and recite the words, that seem likely to foster the growth and profitability of their organization.
Your hope that the emergent-universe paradigm might appeal to religions the world over is based on a misunderstanding. Religions are not really concerned with ontological, metaphysical, spiritual, or cosmological issues–to say nothing of humanistic concerns. They talk all the time about such things, but this is a ruse. None of religion’s entrepreneurs will adopt your framework unless it looks like a good way to fill the collection plate.
[A]gnostic and atheist “secular humanists” have been quietly taught that spirituality is foolish or, at best, questionable. Some secular humanists are spiritual but most are not. We are thus cut off from a deep aspect of our humanity. Humans have led intricate and meaningful spiritual lives for thousands of years, and many secular humanists are bereft of it.
Define spiritual, and tell me what’s good about it. But do so without referring to religion. Until you separate the two you cannot speak meaningfully on this issue.
[A]ll of us, whether we are secular or of faith, lack a global ethic. In part this is a result of the split, fostered by reductionism, between the world of fact and the world of values.
Our lack of a global ethic–if indeed we do lack one–can more reasonably be linked to our just recently having emerged from the hunter-gatherer world wherein one would never meet anyone from the other side of the valley, to say nothing of the world.
We lack a shared worldwide framework of values that spans our traditions and our responsibilities to all of life, one another, and the planet. Secular humanists believe in fairness and the love of family and friends, and we place our faith in democracy.
Don’t you think fairness, love, and democracy is a pretty good framework? You bring in secular humanism, and then at religion’s insistence you toss it aside. But this is exactly the framework we need.
How strange this world would seem to medieval Europe. How alien it seems to fundamentalist Muslims.
Thank God for that!
the morning paper
harbinger of good and ill
- – I step over it
by Dave McCroskey
from Haiku for People
[YASHWATA's note: This is the 13th chapter of Bertrand Russell's astonishing History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1945. A lark, a flying carpet, a bright stroke brushed with verve and wit across three millennia, this brief chapter wings us from a consideration of Plato's cultural and ethical milieu to a simple explanation of the necessity of democracy. As always, Russell makes it look easy. There are more insights available in these 1,300 words than in most other whole books.]
CHAPTER XIII
The Sources of Plato’s Opinions
Plato and Aristotle were the most influential of all philosophers, ancient, medieval, or modern; and of the two, it was Plato who had the greater effect upon subsequent ages. I say this for two reasons: first, that Aristotle himself is an outcome of Plato; second, that Christian theology and philosophy, at any rate until the thirteenth century, was much more Platonic than Aristotelian. It is necessary, therefore, in a history of philosophic thought, to treat Plato, and to a lesser degree Aristotle, more fully than any of their predecessors or successors.
The most important matters in Plato’s philosophy are: first, his Utopia, which was the earliest of a long series; second, his theory of ideas, which was a pioneer attempt to deal with the still unsolved problem of universals; third, his arguments in favour of immortality; fourth, his cosmogony; fifth, his conception of knowledge as reminiscence rather than perception. But before dealing with any of these topics, I shall say a few words about the circumstances of his life and the influences which determined his political and philosophical opinions.
Plato was born in 428-7 B.C., in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. He was a well-to-do aristocrat, related to various people who were concerned in the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. He was a young man when Athens was defeated, and he could attribute the defeat to democracy, which his social position and his family connections were likely to make him despise. He was a pupil of Socrates, for whom he had a profound affection and respect; and Socrates was put to death by the democracy. It is not, therefore, surprising that he should turn to Sparta for an adumbration of his ideal commonwealth. Plato possessed the art to dress up illiberal suggestions in such a way that they deceived future ages, which admired the Republic without ever becoming aware of what was involved in its proposals. It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him. This is the common fate of great men. My object is the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.
The purely philosophical influences on Plato were also such as to predispose him in favour of Sparta. These influences, speaking broadly, were: Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates.
From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for mathematics, and his intimate intermingling of intellect and mysticism.
From Parmenides he derived the belief that reality is eternal and timeless, and that, on logical grounds, all change must be illusory.
From Heraclitus he derived the negative doctrine that there is nothing permanent in the sensible world. This, combined with the doctrine of Parmenides, led to the conclusion that knowledge is not to be derived from the senses, but is only to be achieved by the intellect. This, in turn fitted in well with Pythagoreanism.
From Socrates he probably learnt his preoccupation with ethical problems, and his tendency to seek teleological rather than mechanical explanations of the world. “The Good” dominated his thought more than that of the pre-Socratics, and it is difficult not to attribute this fact to the influence of Socrates.
How is all this connected with authoritarianism in politics?
In the first place: Goodness and Reality being timeless, the best state will be the one which most nearly copies the heavenly model, by having a minimum of change and a maximum of static perfection, and its rulers should be those who best understand the eternal Good.
In the second place: Plato, like all mystics, has, in his beliefs, a core of certainty which is essentially incommunicable except by a way of life. The Pythagoreans had endeavoured to set up a rule of the initiate, and this is, at bottom, what Plato desires. If a man is to be a good statesman, he must know the Good; this he can only do by a combination of intellectual and moral discipline. If those who have not gone through this discipline are allowed a share in the government, they will inevitably corrupt it.
In the third place: much education is needed to make a good ruler on Plato’s principles. It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato’s point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible. This view implies an oligarchy.
In the fourth place: Plato, in common with most Greek philosophers, took the view that leisure is essential to wisdom, which will therefore not be found among those who have to work for their living, but only among those who have independent means, or who are relieved by the state from anxieties as to their subsistence. This point of view is essentially aristocratic.
Two general questions arise in confronting Plato with modem ideas. The first is: Is there such a thing as “wisdom”? The second is: Granted that there is such a thing, can any constitution be devised that will give it political power?
“Wisdom,” in the sense supposed, would not be any kind of specialized skill, such as is possessed by the shoemaker or the physician or the military tactician. It must be something more generalized than this, since its possession is supposed to make a man capable of governing wisely. I think Plato would have said that it consists in knowledge of the good, and would have supplemented this definition with the Socratic doctrine that no man sins wittingly, from which it follows that whoever knows what is good does what is right. To us, such a view seems remote from reality. We should more naturally say that there are divergent interests, and that the statesman should arrive at the best available compromise. The members of a class or a nation may have a common interest, but it will usually conflict with the interests of other classes or other nations. There are, no doubt, some interests of mankind as a whole, but they do not suffice to determine political action. Perhaps they will do so at some future date, but certainly not so long as there are many sovereign States. And even then the most difficult part of the pursuit of the general interest would consist in arriving at compromises among mutually hostile special interests.
But even if we suppose that there is such a thing as “wisdom,” is there any form of constitution which will give the government to the wise? It is clear that majorities, like general councils, may err, and in fact have erred. Aristocracies are not always wise; kings are often foolish; Popes, in spite of infallibility, have committed grievous errors. Would anybody advocate entrusting the government to university graduates, or even to doctors of divinity? Or to men who, having been born poor, have made great fortunes? It is clear that no legally definable selection of citizens is likely to be wiser, in practice, than the whole body.
It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a suitable training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this would turn out to be a party question.
The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.
—Bertrand Russell. 1945. A history of Western philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 104-107.
Doubt polls. Doubt them very much. We’ll be seeing a lot of them in the next few months. They are mostly evil.
During Dubya’s reign, countless half-wits declared him to be more “likeable” than his opponents. To maximize the damage, organizations lacking a sense of shame ran polls on this topic.
A recent Zogby/Williams Identity Poll … found that 57% of undecided voters would rather have a beer with Bush than Kerry. (In Bush’s case, it would be a nonalcoholic beer.) … A new Pew Research Center Poll asked swing voters who comes off more as a “real person,” Bush or Kerry? Bush won, 56% to 38%.
–Richard Benedetto, “Who’s more likeable, Bush or Kerry?”, USA Today, 9/17/2004
It might be true that most of those polled would have had a more pleasant chat with Bush than with Kerry. I don’t care, because this is obviously irrelevant to the question of who would have made a better president.
It’s even possible that Bush treats his immediate family and closest friends–even acquaintances, let’s say–with more kindness than does Kerry. I don’t know; but this, too, is irrelevant to the question of who would have made a better President.
Here’s a poll I would love to do.
“In your opinion, should the Zogby employee who proposed asking voters which presidential candidate they’d rather have a beer with, and the Pew staffer who decided to ask them which one comes off more as a ‘real person’, be shot?”
