Letters from Le Vrai

An Atheist in the Pulpit

2008-04-10T20:11:00.003-05:00

I know I said that I wasn't going to blog about atheism and religion, or atheism versus religion, etc.; but I think it's important to sometimes reflect on the difficult soul-searching that goes on inside the "souls" of those who were raised in some type of religious faith.

As I've recounted elsewhere, I've gone through my own "dark night of the soul." I think those of us atheists who were not raised in a traditionally religious home cannot quite appreciate the unique intellectual and emotional journey of those born into a hegemonic religious milieu.

The following article is from Psychology Today:

Public identity and private belief are never more at odds than when a preacher loses his faith.

By: Bruce Grierson

James McAllister, a 56-year-old Lutheran minister in the midwest, was working on his sunday sermon one Thursday afternoon last summer. It wasn't going well. The reverend wasn't suffering from writer's block—in fact, he was crafting quite an elegant parable about "the importance of making our whole lives a prayer." No, the problem was bigger than that. The sermon skated around a private truth that McAllister could no longer deny.

McAllister has learned that you can tell inspirational stories, grounded in social justice and tolerance and peace, without having to bring God into the picture—and this sermon was a masterful case in point. A woman in his congregation had recently dropped everything to care for her cancer-stricken daughter, and that selfless commitment was sacred in its way. "You can see how I cook the books a little bit to make it easier to look in the mirror," he says of his sermons. "But there are times when I get that sort of empty feeling in my stomach, like I'm a fraud."

Months ago, McAllister, who is presented pseudonymously here, took his crisis to the bishop. He'd lost the faith, he explained, and he wanted out.

"Oh you're not quitting," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "You haven't lost your faith."

"Um, yeah I have," McAllister said. "This is for real."

The bishop shook her head. For the church elders, McAllister's revelations simply did not compute.

"They're either in complete denial," he says, "or they're completely comfortable with the idea that they have a pastor who's a fraud, as long as he puts asses in the seats."

McAllister took the issue up with his psychiatrist. "It emerged that she was a devout Christian herself," he says. "To her credit, she tried to be professional." Where she had once begun and ended their sessions with prayer, she stopped when he asked her to. "But I could see she was squirming. You know, she was sitting with a man of the cloth who had lost it. She had problems with that."

To be a clergyman struggling with God in modern times is to reside at the center of a great battle. At a time when the tension between faith and doubt arguably defines the distance between people more than does gender or race or even politics, the Doubting Priest bears witness for the defense and the prosecution. (Mother Teresa's grave spiritual doubt, as revealed last fall in her letters, means one of two things: Either the closest thing to a modern saint was a phony, or her trials actually make her religious life more meaningful, a poignant example of faith not as a certainty but as a required test that leads to a more profound commitment.) The spiritual struggles of ministers and priests and rabbis remind us that, amid encroaching fundamentalism, atheism is also on the rise. The neo-atheist movement is fueled by outspoken academics and intellectuals including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others who bombard the airwaves and bestseller lists with their calls for deconversion. You can now send your kid to an atheist summer camp or get yourself certifiably "de-baptized." (Britain's national Secular Society offers the service: "Liberate yourself from the original mumbo jumbo that liberated you from the original sin you never had.") There are hundreds of college-campus groups devoted to secular humanism. The Atheist Alliance International reports "so many speaking requests that leaders of national atheist groups can't keep up."

Even amid the neo-atheist din, a clergy member's crisis of faith stands out. The natural order of things is upset when those entrusted with the protection of souls lose the plot. Because the clergy's livelihood and public identity are intimately bound up with their faith, practical considerations can be just as pressing as theological doubt. And the split between private beliefs and public sermons can leave religious leaders feeling deeply inauthentic, a source of psychic stress that most laypeople will never know.

Many soul-searching clergy never leave the church, making the ranks of ordained agnostics and atheists impossible to tally. But the raw numbers aren't much on the minds of clergy actually in the throes of deconversion. Their doubt is as real and immediate as a cloud over the sun. And somewhere in the nest of questions is a simple one: How did this happen?

McAllister had been raised Catholic, then drifted into a 25-year interregnum where he stopped going to church and called himself an atheist. A midlife spiritual restlessness nudged him into chaplaincy training years ago. A second-career minister—for most of his life he was a graphic designer and a fine artist—McAllister approaches the Big Questions more in the manner of a scholar than of a monk. (Even as a Catholic grade-school kid, he recalls, he hungered for real evidence. "Why," he would ask the nuns, "did this stuff all happen so long ago before there were cameras and TVs? Why aren't there prophets and holy people and miracles now?") Frustrated with his denomination but by no means ready to bail out, he picked up Sam Harris's book The End of Faith. He found he "agreed with about 98 percent of it."

He picked up other books in the neo-atheist canon. He read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and then the one-two punch of Christopher Hitchens's mega-bestselling God Is Not Great and his earlier Letter to a Christian Nation. He closed the latter book and found himself saying, aloud, "Amen." He had to face his misgivings. "I realized, it isn't just that I'm hurt by the way I was treated at synod, and it isn't just that the senior pastor that I work with was an asshole. It's that I don't believe in this anymore. And that was terrifying."

McAllister is not just scared for himself. "I know that my parishioners look to me for comfort," he says. "They're coming to the end of their life and they want some assurance that it's all going to be OK. I have sat at the deathbed of people in my congregation and told them what I regard as lies—or fantasies, at least—just to give them comfort. I'm willing to do that up to a point, but not for the rest of my working life."

Then there's the practical dimension. McAllister owes the church $18,000 for his schooling, at the same time as he's trying to put his last son through college. "I'm 56, which isn't a real good age to be pounding the pavement, and I've got a master's of divinity, not the most marketable degree in the world."

Richard Dawkins is convinced that McAllister's situation is common; in fact, he hopes one day to address it through "clergyman-retraining scholarships," set up through his charitable foundation, to "bridge the gap between living a lie and getting a new life," as he puts it.

McAllister's dilemma is familiar to Dan Barker, who coheads the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The group spreads the word about atheism and fights legal battles to keep church and state separate. It is a soft place to land for the doubters who find it. Barker daily receives e-mails and letters from people who are wrestling with issues of faith, and he always writes back promptly and cheerily. E-mails from clergy are a very small part of the mix. But of all the stories he hears, these are the ones that resonate most—because they are his story, too.

Barker was a religious prodigy. Raised attending a charismatic Pentecostal church near Disneyland, he received "the call" at age 15, and wasted no time spreading the good news. He converted his high-school Spanish teacher. He became part of an evangelical team that went door-to-door holding revival meetings. He penned and performed popular Christian jingles.

But after a milestone birthday, number 30, came and went in 1979, Barker found himself agitated. Creatively, he was stalled; he was having trouble working on a Christian musical about a lost lamb, "because," he explains, "my views were changing while I was trying to write it." The restlessness, he determined, was spiritual. "It was as if there was a little knock on my skull and somebody was saying, 'Hello! Anybody home?' I was starving and didn't know it, like when you work hard on a project and forget to eat and don't know you are hungry until you are really hungry."

He began reading widely outside the Christian canon: science magazines, psychology, philosophy. It was the liberal-arts education he never had, and what followed was "a slow but steady migration across the theological spectrum" that took about five years. (Among the deeply faithful, doubt is often first stoked with exposure to the "outside world.")

As he carried on a secret life of secular reading, Barker phased out the fire-and-brimstone sermons. "But even then I felt hypocritical, often hearing myself mouth words about which I was no longer sure, but words that the audience wanted to hear."

The confirmation, as Barker interpreted it, came one night in November, as he lay on a burlap cot in a church in a Mexican border town where he'd come to give a guest sermon. As he peered out at a splash of stars, Barker had a sudden profound sensation that had nothing to do with intellect, the kind of deeply felt moment more commonly associated with finding God than losing Him. He was, Barker understood, utterly alone here.

"For my whole life there had been this giant eyeball looking at me, this god, this holy spirit, this church history, and this Bible. And not only everything I did but everything I thought was being judged: Was God pleased? I realized that that wasn't there anymore. It occurred to me, 'I own these thoughts. Nobody knows what I'm thinking right now. There's no fear of hell, no fear of judgment, I don't have to be right or wrong, I can just be me.'" It felt as if charges had been dropped for a crime for which he had been falsely accused. It was exhilarating and frightening all at once. "When you're ready to jump out of an airplane to skydive, you can be terrified but excited at the same time," he says. "There's a point where you go, all right, let's do this."

Says Barker: "we surveyed our members some years ago, asking them: "If you were raised religious, why did you change your mind?" There was no one answer. Some people gave social reasons: the way the church treats women. Some people gave reasons like, 'the fear of hell—I just couldn't live with that.' But the answer people gave more often than any other was that it was intellectual: Religion eventually just did not make sense."

Looking back, Tom Reed, a former Roman Catholic priest from Mississippi, can pretty clearly identify his own moment of truth. It followed a quick succession of historical events: the 1968 Vatican statement upholding opposition to birth control and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The two events finished off Reed's faith in the church and his faith in God.

For Reed, deconversion was almost as quick and binary as the flick of a switch. At a certain point, he says, "it was suddenly clear that the courageous thing to do was to just admit that this is all made up.

"I remember waking up one day saying, I'm going to practice being an atheist, just move through the day with that in mind. It had become a part of my being, the idea that God was ultimately responsible for everything that was happening. Now I proceeded from the assumption that there was no God in the picture."

It sounds like a coolly rational process, a Jesuitical internal debate tipping forward into certainty. It wasn't. "It was scary as hell," Reed says. "I realized, 'I'm not going to see my mother and father again.' " The sense of cold finality, the impression that one's prayers are just so many tennis balls served into the ocean: Such existential issues are a big part of anybody's crisis of faith. But for religious leaders, the stakes are raised even further, for faith is no longer a private matter.

"As a clergyman your livelihood is not just a job—it's a whole theological system that you'd better be on board with," says Dick Hewetson, a former Episcopal minister from Minnesota who left the church to do secular work and soon called himself an atheist.

"It hit me during those last couple of years in the pulpit that everything coming out of my mouth was being taken as gospel," he says. "I began to think, This is crazy. If I tell these people something, they believe me. Remember Jonestown? People asked, How could that happen? Well, I know how. I wasn't the Jim Jones type, and my people weren't the Jonestown type. But I was the shepherd and they were the sheep, for sure."

Charles Templeton, the late Canadian evangelist-turned-journalist, argued that a disjunction between what clergymen say publicly and what they believe privately is so common that serious cognitive dissonance comes with the territory. "Most intelligent clergymen preach to the right of their theology," Templeton wrote in his memoir Farewell to God. "They are more conservative in the pulpit than they are in private conversation or when counseling a parishioner."

What eventually happens, as it did for James McAllister, is that sermons become cooler and less dogmatic. The clergyman, stated Templeton, "is likely to settle for what might best be described as an altruistic, do-goodest Christian philosophy."

Krista Wren [name changed], who never became a minister only because doors were quietly closed in front of her, tells a tale of spiritual disaffection with an ironic twist. A minister's wife from Atlanta and "a flailing Christian for 23 years," Wren worked with her husband on Pat Robertson's ministry before leaving to do missionary work in Africa. She thought of herself as a missionary; unfortunately for her, no one else did. At one fund-raising meeting prior to the couple's African departure, three dozen people gathered around her husband, Tom [name changed], and one said a prayer: "God, anoint Tom to bring forth your word with power! Let him see miracles as he prays for the people of Africa. May he lead many to Christ as you empower his words... " Then the crowd gathered around her. She held her breath in anticipation. "And Dear God," a woman's voice said, "please give Krista creative ways to do laundry." It was a decisive moment and in a way a portent of the end. "Maybe I've not gotten past it because it sums up the mind of many churches and even so many scriptures," Wren wrote in a recent e-mail to Dan Barker, with whom she had been corresponding. "Men do great things for God—and women wash their shorts."

Wren is currently a hairsbreadth away from throwing it all over the side and coming out as an atheist.

But here is the twist: Her husband became a pastor only because, many years ago, she converted him. ("And with a great deal of effort.") Now she's heading back across the bridge the other way. She is virtually certain he won't make the trip with her. What is certain is that their marriage will be tested. Her disaffection is a subject so delicate she handles it with tongs.

"I'm hesitant to say too much, but the things that I have said have caused him to look as though his dog just died. When he learned I was corresponding with Dan—he looked over my shoulder in the middle of an e-mail—the color drained from his face. He shook his head and said, as he walked out of the room, 'This is just sad.' Well, part of me thinks it's sad, and part of me thinks it's about damn time."

Barker's own marriage did not survive his spiritual U-turn. (His wife, who remains faithful, remarried a Baptist minister.) And their four children?

"We both agreed that the children should never have to be in a position where they had to choose sides." One son has announced that he doesn't believe in God. One daughter "was going to a Unitarian church for a while, and I think she might be a nominal believer." A second daughter "has been a New Agey believer for a while." The third daughter is patently, traditionally religious. Barker seems pleased by the way the kids landed all across the spectrum of belief/disbelief, pixels in a snapshot of free will. Religious conversion is often explained in part as an effort to relieve the tension of uncertainty ("If the decision could be made conscious," psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wrote, "I think it would be as if that person said to himself or herself, 'I am willing to do anything—anything—in order to liberate myself from this chaos.'") But letting faith go, in the end, can bring relief, too.

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

In Dan Barker's journey from fundamentalism to atheism, there were two stages of disillusionment. First came the loss of faith in the religion (that is, the loss of faith in the literal word), and then came the loss of faith in faith itself.

"The first step is hardest," he says. "Because as a fundamentalist, there is no middle ground.

"I remember a pastor telling me that he had a couple of congregants who didn't believe in the historical truth of Adam and Eve. They thought that Adam and Eve were a metaphor. I was shocked. I thought, 'How can you even let them be in your church? If parts of the Bible can be allegorized, then anything goes!'

"But I made the leap: OK, the fact that I disagree with these Christians should not be grounds for disfellowshipping them. That was a hard thing for me to do. But once I did it, the later flying leaps that I made were easier to take, psychologically, because I'd already admitted some gray."

A number of the clergy who have contacted Barker tell of a similar spiritual arc. It's as if a kind of psychological algorithm begins to work, with the shedding of illusions proceeding in inevitable, sequential steps, until an outdated belief is pitched with last night's coffee grounds. We wake up, if we're lucky: case closed.

And yet it is not so simple as that. Carlton Pearson is an example of a clergyman whose spiritual about-face need not end up where neo-atheists say it should. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Pearson, then a Pentecostal bishop, was among the most prominent and beloved fundamentalist preachers in the American South, heading up a megachurch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a loyal congregation 5,000 strong.

But something happened to Pearson as he and his church nosed toward the millennium. He stopped believing in hell and sin and the literal interpretation of the scriptures.

He was eating dinner in front of the TV with his baby daughter. On the news, Peter Jennings was revisiting Rwanda, investigating the fallout from that country's civil war. The scene was nightmarish: tiny infants, flies in their eyes and hair red from malnutrition groping at the empty breasts of their skeletal mothers. Carlton looked over at his own plump-faced child, then back at the TV. These African kids would soon be gone. Gone where? According to his own formal belief system, they were bound for hell. Somebody, he thought, needs to preach the gospel to these kids right now. To save them.

And then another thought formed. "You think I'm sucking them into hell? Carlton, look. They're already there." This, he thought, is where the pain comes from, all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. We do it to each other, and to ourselves. "I saw emergency rooms and divorce courts and jails," Pearson recalls. "For the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of hell."

It was a very different Carlton Pearson who returned to the pulpit. A lot of things he had been preaching, he told his congregation, were wrong. The central premise of their faith, the idea, "as my dad used to put it, that 'You gonna be cookin,' but you ain't never gonna get done!' " was bogus. There is no eternal damnation.

Almost all of the flock abandoned Pearson, who was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops.

Like Dan Barker, Carlton Pearson made a big leap away from literalism. And that leap set a chain-reaction of new perceptions: He became much less judgmental, more receptive to people and ideas he had dismissed or discounted. Unlike Barker's leap, Pearson's did not land him in a godless place. Throughout his trials the transmission signal of the divine, a felt thing, an inarticulable but absolutely bet-the-farm certainty persisted.

And so instead of abandoning God he invented a new theology that he calls the "gospel of inclusion," and he hung out a new shingle for a church he calls New Dimensions. It's a theology that gives everyone, not just avowed Christians, hope of salvation—and spares everyone the eternal fire of hell.

"I believe the logic of God is inerrant," he says. "I don't believe that the letter is. The logic of God would be love; the letter of God would be law." That Pearson is nominally a Christian seems almost a trivial point. After he was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops, the Unitarian Church of Christ opened its arms to him; and since it preached an inclusiveness he appreciated, the denomination seemed as good a place as any to hang his hat.

The Unitarian Church is a haven for many an atheist and agnostic, offering the comforting ritual (hymns are often rewritten with nontheistic lyrics) and esprit de corps of religion, without the dogma. Suzanne Paul, a minister to the New Hope Unitarian Universalist congregation in the suburbs of Detroit, was raised Roman Catholic, but could not stop questioning the "logic" of the Bible, and concluded that she was an atheist at age 20. She became involved in humanistic Judaism through her husband and finally found a niche in New Hope, where she leads holiday celebrations she sorely missed. "We celebrate Passover, Easter, Yom Kippur, asking, 'What can we learn from this holiday?' Yom Kippur, for example, is about forgiveness and atonement. We are naturally social animals and like to be with like-minded people. I enjoy the community aspect of religion but not the theistic end of it."

It took Suzanne some three decades to openly declare herself an atheist. "I recognized early that you can clear a room if you say you're an atheist. I prefer to identify myself as a humanist."

Pearson, too, has struggled with when and how to characterize his beliefs. "I don't always say this publicly but I'm starting to feel more free to do so: I don't necessarily believe in a god, or the God; I just believe in God."

Since his new direction, Pearson's fortunes have plummeted. Only about a hundred people hear him preach on Sundays at 1 p.m. because they have to wait until the Episcopalians finish their service. "We're in a foster-care program," he says.

And when people approach him and say, "Bishop Pearson, I'm losing my faith," he now has a better answer.

"We spend our lives impersonating who we think others want us to be," he says. "And we end up as living impostors. So, when someone comes to me and tells me they're losing their faith, I congratulate them. You're starting to embrace your own thinking self—the essential, immutable, immortal self— as opposed to the accidental criminal you have been made to think you are."

Doubt, for Carlton Pearson, isn't a sign that one's faith is evaporating; it's just a sign that it's going underground and changing.

And so there emerges, in the literature of spiritual self-transformation, a kind of parallel canon between the religious conversions and the Dawkins-style deconversions. It is the idea of the full circle, or the nun-turned-religious scholar Karen Armstrong's so-called "spiral staircase," wherein we eventually come back around to our old spiritual position, but at a higher level, from which we see a wider landscape.

It's the story of the young Carl Jung. Growing up in Geneva, he watched his parson father become tormented by religious doubt. This made him reject conventional religious practice, but it sharpened his sense of the importance of some sort of personal spiritual quest, which he regarded as the main issue in the life of everyone over 35.

The desertion of priests and nuns from the Catholic church since the 1960s seems to be the story of an en masse loss of faith. "But it can also be seen as a strengthening of faith," says John Portmann, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, who is working on a book on "cultural Catholicism." (By far the most-cited reason for leaving was unrelated to God: It was church policy on celibacy and marriage.) "If some semblance of faith can persist in spite of all [the church's missteps and scandals], you know your faith is real, you weren't in it for the trappings of the church or the comfort of the rituals."

Dan Barker has now been an atheist longer than he was a believer, and he is at peace with his decision. But for the more recent deconverts, some struggles remain. Perhaps chief among them is finding a substitute for the very real consolations that faith provided. When you've lost God, how do you fill the void?

"That's what I'm wrestling with now," says James McAllister. "I don't have anyone to talk to in my heart. The prayers I used to say, I simply don't bother anymore. I obviously regard prayer to be silly, even. But it was a comforting place that I could go. I've let that go. And there is a void. And hopefully it can be replaced just by appreciating being alive."

Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008
Last Reviewed 2 Apr 2008
Article ID: 4493

Interlude: Thirty-four Thousand Feet Above Sea Level

2008-01-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

The early morning sunlight, the severely angular light, makes of the web of thread-like gossamer rivers below silvery veins, as if the earth were one colossal chunk of ore.

This place is something to return to, secretly and alone, to plunder with one's hands or with one's heart.

Digesting Naturalism

2008-01-12T10:38:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven't been posting here for a while; or only sporadically. I've grown increasingly weary from reading and trying to address the almost daily incursions into public discourse and governmental policy (both national and local) by the Evangelical Religious Right.

Additionally, I've become bored with the Ping-Pong match between the pejoratively-named "New Atheists" and their scores of detractors. I've written about this numerous times before, so I will just briefly reiterate my thoughts on the matter.

Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens have been derided for their disrespectful and caustic tone; for their allegedly incomplete scholarship as regards contemporary theistic arguments; for their alleged advocacy of a fascist-like pogrom to rid the country of anyone professing religious belief of any kind; and for their alleged tarnishing of the good, and more temperate, name of atheism.

But the main goal of these New Atheists, as I read them, is to rid public discourse of the taboo against ridiculing the ridiculous; a subsidiary goal is to rid public discourse of the taboo against atheism as such. Of course, reasonable people will debate whether or not their approach to this secondary goal is the right one or not.

But what I see as the underlying motif in this campaign, as well as the more temperate tomes of thinkers like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan, is the project of de-deifying nature and, more importantly, re-naturalizing human beings.

I think the project of de-deifying nature has been almost entirely completed thanks to the blossoming of the sciences since the early 19th Century. The project of re-naturalizing human beings has also made great strides ever since the "Decade of the Brain" in the 1990's, and the steadily increasing maturation of the disciplines falling under the umbrella of neuroscience.

But there a few major obstacles to overcome before a naturalistic world-view can become widespread. These may prove insurmountable. Chief among these is the idea that human beings do not have a soul, much less a "self" that is an actual entity that comprises the kernel of personal identity. What I mean by that is what Siddhartha Gautama claimed 2,500 years ago: there is no self.

The other big one is the notion of free will - that human beings possess a power to contravene the law of universal causality. Or, as libertarian William Thomas puts it:

In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally well have chosen to do something else. Within the sphere of actions that are open to choice, what we do is up to us and is not just the inescapable outcome of causes outside our control.

But there are good philosophical arguments against this view, as well as an increasing body of scientific evidence in opposition to it. The only legitimate argument in defense of it, in my view, is that from personal experience: we all feel as if we have free will. But as Spinoza noted a long time ago, "Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire."

A more general and over-arching resistance to the re-naturalization of human beings is the displacement of our perceived importance in the Universe: we are not a loving and omnipotent god's creation; we may not even be alone in the Universe; and we are not even the apogee of the evolutionary process.

So instead of spending my time railing against the incursions of the Evangelical Religious Right and their self-proclaimed "moral majority"; or against scientifically illiterate school boards and Presidential candidates; or trying to secure a place at the table of public discourse for atheism; I will spend my time and energy trying to persuade us human beings of the need for re-naturalizing ourselves. As regarding the former activities, I will speak my mind at the ballot box.

My template for this process of re-naturalization will be what was the central concern of Friedrich Nietzsche. Whatever people think they know of Nietzsche's ideas, they are probably misinformed - and his ideas misrepresented. Granted, Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to understand, and I am indebted to the writings and correspondence of British philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson for his accessible exegesis of Nietzsche's corpus; but I will continue the attempt to render Nietzsche's prescient ideas in a more modern vernacular. My next post will attempt just that, as concisely and as cogently as I can.

Tags:

naturalism, Nietzsche

New Year's Resolution

2008-01-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish for myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year - what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in all things. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!

- Friedrich Nietzsche from The Gay Science (1882)

Technorati tags:

New Year's Resolution, naturalism, Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I forgot how beautiful the Earth is...

2007-12-15T11:03:00.000-05:00

As someone with a naturalistic view of existence and the world, it surprises me to find how little I spend appreciating the actual world. Sure, you can philosophize until it comes out your ear holes, but what good is all that if you never take the time to see the world? And I don't just mean going outside for a walk or hiking on a local trail. I mean actually seeing more of the world than what's within an easy traveling distance.

Two weeks ago I had to fly out to Los Angeles from where I live in New Jersey. I suppose I was fortunate, because as we climbed to almost 40,000 ft we enjoyed clear skies for almost the entire flight. The first thing that struck me was how immense the Earth is. Sure, you can quote numbers and measures and statistics about the dimensions of the Earth, but until you are put in a place where you can experience its vastness - at least as much as possible - you don't get the same feelings of wonder and awe.

As we left the Northeast - which I've seen from a plane hundreds of times before - we flew over the bread basket of our country, the Great Plains. From that altitude, you can see areas that are sparsely populated, interspersed with the bricolage of tilled and farmed land - a patchwork quilt of muted, earthy colors. From this perspective you could also see the multiplicity of communal arrangements: from hamlet to village to town to city.

But the real interesting geography came into view as we left the Plains States for the Rocky Mountain States. First the long, sloping foothills come into view - a steady, calm overture gradually rising to a crescendo of the forbidding abruptness of a colossal mountain fortress, so massive that one is compelled to think it must conceal and guard the most precious treasure in its labyrinthine keep. My favorite mountain peak has to be the Grand Tetons of Wyoming:

Leaving the seemingly unbroken chain of rocky mountains threading their way up into the far north, we come upon a series of smaller massifs, with the distance between them growing larger and larger. Many of them have stopped short of thrusting above the timberline, and their sparsely forested peaks merge more gingerly into more densely forested foothills.

But soon the irregular fringe of forested expanse gives way to an interlude of the dimpled, the wrinkled, and the jagged, before giving way to the more desolate sweep of the deserts. We see variegated mesas, some small and discreet, others that stretch almost out of sight, leaving the impression of a gigantic, petrified wave frozen in place, eternally on the brink of tipping but never crashing down upon its uninhabited shore. Before long you are startled by the feathered fractals sporadically spread over the sandstone - rivers that have cut channels through the uniform, parched wasteland of earth, which the unflagging wind has brushed and softened.

One last gift before we enter the gates of civilization again is the Barringer meteorite crater in Arizona:

Again, one could be impressed by the measures and dimensions: nearly 4,000 feet wide and over 500 feet deep, it was created by a 150 foot-wide meteorite traveling at an approximate speed of 29,000 m.p.h.! Seeing it from 40,000 feet in the sky was impressive, but I can only imagine how impressive it would have been to stand at its rim; and how doubly impressive it would have been if I had seen it from a plane and stood at its rim...

While all these terrestrial and extraterrestrial phenomena bear the twin aspects of exhilaration and fear, the humanly-created possesses a similar grandeur. As we leave the vast blanket of desert and descend over the last few massifs before the vaster expanse of the open sea, we again encounter sprawling humanity filling every corner and cranny of the spacious valley. But it's not merely the virus-like fecundity of our species that astonishes, but the works of our minds and our hands - the freeways, tunnels, bridges, and skyscrapers. We are the most relentlessly and restlessly creative animal on earth, for good or ill.

But it seems to have fallen to our lot to attempt the increasingly mutually exclusive goals of both flourishing and sustaining life - all life.

Technorati tags:

naturalism, religious naturalism, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Barringer Meteorite Crater, Grand Tetons

He once was dead; now He is risen

2007-12-14T07:55:00.000-05:00

The greatest recent event - that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.

Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event - and these initial consequences . . . are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.

At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Before I get into my discussion, I want to clarify a few things. First, Nietzsche wrote this in 1882, so this idea that "God is dead" is certainly not new. Second, when Nietzsche says that the Christian god is dead, he means it metaphorically; he means to say that the Christian value system - which up to that point enjoyed an unparalleled hegemony over Europe - was no longer tenable to many. Third - and in case any unread Religious Right party member, or member of the Moral Majority, find their way to this blog - the word "gay" in Nietzsche's lexicon meant "joyous" and not "homosexual." Of course, that shouldn't need to be said...

Despite what many people think of Nietzsche - that is, that he was a life-denying nihilist - he in fact argued for a heretofore unimagined affirmation of life, this life, and not some after-worldly life. I think this misunderstanding comes from not reading Nietzsche's works, and simply relying on what "they" say about him and his philosophy.

He viewed Christian morality as life-denying or life-negating (incidentally, he viewed Buddhism the same way). He believed Christianity taught hatred for the body, for the earth, for anything that was not directed toward the other-worldly paradise of Heaven. In this sense was Nietzsche an "immoralist." But perhaps here a word should be said about the difference between morality and religious culture.

Alonzo Fyfe of the Atheist Ethicist wrote an insightful post about this difference:

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

Fyfe goes on to give some examples:

We can easily classify the prescriptions against murder, rape, child abuse, slavery, assault, theft, lying, ‘bearing false witness’, breaking promises or contracts, recklessness, negligence, and similar kinds of actions as prescriptions that the agent will have to take with him as he goes into society.

We can just as easily identify a set of prescriptions that an agent can leave behind – where the fact that one religion may require these types of actions while another does not is of little social consequence. These prescriptions include what to eat or drink, when to eat or drink, where to live (the concept of ‘homeland’), when to pray, how to pray, to whom one is to pray, which scripture to read, when to work (or not work), what to wear. These are the prescriptions that I will put in the category of ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that the members of a religion may not impose on others.

Bearing in mind the difference between morality and religious culture, we can return to Nietzsche for a moment. Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to understand and interpret, mainly because he didn't write as a systematic philosopher, and his writing style was more stylistic than stodgy and academic.

Although it's not possible to distill Nietzsche's thought into a single aphorism, perhaps the best we can do for our present purpose is University of Warwick philosophy professor Keith Ansell Pearson's description:

There is no longer any ‘true world’ to be faithful to and to aspire to, that is, no realm of pure being that would give us permanence, bliss, peace, unity, harmony, etc. Rather we are to affirm terrestrial life – becoming, change, multiplicity, plurality – as our only life and in all its complexity and difficulty.

Nietzsche thinks that through naturalism – what he calls the task of translating the human being back into nature – we will, in fact, enrich and potentially expand our conceptions of the possibilities of human existence. To do this he thinks we must be brave, honest, and patient: the free spirit must learn, he says, the value of keeping its energy and enthusiasm in bounds.

But it's not my aim in this post to dissect and present Nietzsche's philosophy. My goal in this post is to talk about how the Christian god (or equally the Muslim or Jewish god) has been "dying" for the past century or so, only to begin to be restored to good health in the past quarter of this century - at least in America.

The most consistent resuscitation attempts have been to sneak creationism/Intelligent Design into our public school systems; federal funding for faith-based programs; and the idea, even among Democrats, that only a "person of faith" - by which they mean a person of Christian or Jewish faith - can lead this country. But perhaps the most ambitious and, arguably, the most ominous attempt is the resolution that passed in the House of Representatives: "Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith."

I say "ominous" because, as cited in the resolution itself, there are 225,000,000 Christians in this country. That's a lot of Christians, given the fact that our current population is approximately 300,000,000. I'm not sure who they include in their number, but let's assume that 75% of the 300 million are both Christian and members of our electorate. Recent polls have suggested that 90% of Americans are Christian, so I imagine 75% is conservative. I could certainly be wrong.

But if 90% of the population is Christian, and 75% are entitled to vote, and since politicians for national office must necessarily pander to constituencies in order to even get elected, what would happen if this were to become the basis for a Constitutional amendment? Everyone knows there are many people who would love to see a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (a prescription of "religious culture", as the Atheist Ethicist would note).

I mean, who doesn't love Christmas? I'm an atheist, and I love Christmastime. But I enjoy a secular Christmas. I enjoy the gathering of friends and family, the good food and drink, the snow - even the holiday songs (with a few exceptions). Only a true Scrooge could be against it. At least that's what would most likely prevail as "public opinion."

But our government's religious neutrality is exactly what has kept the peace within our country and what has allowed us to flourish. I imagine Christians are confident and emboldened when they hear that 90% of the country is Christian, and that the House of Representatives resolves to express "continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide." These words, "continued support," are disquietingly vague. Just as Congress has abused the somewhat ambiguous "General Welfare" clause of the U.S. Constitution, a Christian Congress would almost certainly abuse a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution making Christianity the State religion, should it become law. Then the 1st Amendment would certainly be tragically superseded by the "Christian Nation" clause.

Perhaps we need to add this development to Naomi Wolf's article "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps," from her forthcoming book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.

Technorati tags:

Nietzsche, Keith Ansell Pearson, House Resolution, Christmas, Christian faith, God is dead, importance of Christmas, importance of the Christian Faith

Mitt Romney

2007-12-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

I'm just going to let Mitt Romney's hypocrisy speak for itself. All quotes below are from his speech. Italics mine.

"Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to
America's greatness: our religious liberty."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be
rejected because of his faith."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one
religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were
reserved only for faiths with which we agree. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a
revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about
the equality of all..."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but
as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are
guaranteed the free exercise of our religion."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"...we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome
our nation's symphony of faith. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

Technorati tags:

Mitt Romney, religious freedom

The Fundamentals of Intelligent Design

2007-11-03T06:48:00.000-05:00

The main point of my previous post "Fundamentalism in Science Education?" was to argue that Intelligent Design shouldn't be taught in science classes because it's not science. It seems to me that Intelligent Design points to gaps in our current understanding of biological complexity, attempts to argue that the mechanism in question is too complex to have arisen through natural processes, and therefore must be the work of an Intelligent Designer. But proponents of Intelligent Design, at least in their public promotion strategy, claim not to know who or what the designer is. However, as I noted in my last post, Intelligent Design is the more publicly palatable incarnation of creationism, though not in the Biblically literal sense.

It seems to me that for Intelligent Design to be science, it must then ask the questions of who or what the designer is, and how this designer in fact designed the mechanisms in question. Despite this lack of investigative posture that is a hallmark of science, the most credentialed and most persistent advocate of Intelligent Design in biology would be Lehigh University's Michael Behe, who has written the relatively popular books Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. Not only have many of Behe's claims been addressed by others, such as biologists Ken Miller of Brown University and Paul R. Gross (currently of the University of Virginia), but Behe's own testimony in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case is evidence that Intelligent Design is not science and, indeed, that it is a Trojan Horse presumably for getting public school children to be open to the possibility that God - specifically the Christian God - is the designer of the Universe. Here are some samples of Behe's testimony:

"Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God."

"Contrary to Professor Behe’s assertions with respect to these few biochemical systems among the myriad existing in nature, however, Dr. Miller presented evidence, based upon peer-reviewed studies, that they are not in fact irreducibly complex."

In response to my post criticizing Discovery Institute's article "Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education", Michael Egnor rightly claims that, since science limits itself to studying what is natural, hypothetical supernatural things like God and Heaven aren't the proper purview of methodological naturalism. However, if one makes the claim that God (or Heaven) exists, we would assume that evidence is forthcoming; after all, everyone has reasons for believing certain propositions. Reasons can be based on strong evidence or weak evidence. Strong evidence is characterized by widely accessible, possibly even repeatable, instances, or even first-hand accounts. Weak evidence would be of the type of anecdotes, of unreliable second or third-hand accounts.

While it's true that methodological naturalism has no bearing on the actual truth, or the actual ontological status of things like God or Heaven (or ghosts), it does have a bearing on the plausibility of such things. While it is certainly possible that such things exist - anything is possible (except things like square circles), the evidence for the existence of such things is of the weak variety, and reduces the plausibility of such things to much less than possible. If we assume - for the sake of argument - that the philosophical arguments for and against the supernatural (primarily God) cancel each other out, then it would seem to me that the evidence for the existence of such things as God and Heaven is derived from ancient "sacred" texts and personal feelings and intuitions, as well as the anecdotal testimony of individual believers.

So a layperson outside the discipline of science would weigh the evidence for the existence of such things. Naturally (no pun intended), if our hypothetical layperson asks the believer in such things for evidence, she will use her critical thinking - which she uses in her "everyday" life - to evaluate such evidence. If a Deist - whose God created the Universe but doesn't intervene in it - makes the claim that his God exists, our layperson would probably claim agnosticism with regard to such a being (though technically that would be atheism, since she would lack a belief in such a God). However, if a Theist claims that there is a personal God who takes an active interest in the lives of human beings, intervenes in the natural world to effect certain types of outcomes, then there should be evidence for such things in the natural world. In addition to her own personal experience, feelings and intuition, our critical thinking layperson will of course look to the relevant scientific disciplines to evaluate the plausibility of the veracity of such evidence, including the reliability of her own personal experiences, feelings and intuitions, as well as any scientific evidence supporting the claims of ancient, purportedly "sacred", texts.

As regards the philosophical "evidence" for all things supernatural, Egnor states that the claim that there is no epistemology for knowing the supernatural is akin to the assertion that "two and a half [millennia] of Western philosophy don't exist." The branch of philosophy known as epistemology is a rather thorny subject. If we regard it broadly as the investigation into what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion, the many philosophers Egnor cites (Kant, Plato, Descartes, Plantinga, Aquinas, etc.) undoubtedly all have their opinions on these matters, and their writings are attempts to justify their positions. One is either convinced by their arguments or one isn't. But one brings to bear one's own intelligence and one's evaluation of corroborating or contradicting evidence in determining if one is convinced. So one utilizes internal as well as external evidence when doing this. The external evidence would be the findings of our best science, because our best science has an incomparable tack record of success in providing knowledge of the world in which we live and believe (or disbelieve) certain propositions that affect that world.

On the one hand Egnor argues that the scientific method (i.e., methodological naturalism) properly "hews to evidence, not philosophical dogma" and that the supernatural is not the proper purview of science; but on the other hand he seems to lament the fact that "atheistic" scientists - particularly Darwinists - employ a philosophical constraint on their discipline. Oddly, he shows how a forerunner of the scientific method like Kepler - a devout Christian - discarded the philosophical dogma of his time in order to accurately explain the workings of the Universe - by adhering to his own philosophical dogma that the Christian God created the world according to a humanly intelligible plan! So Egnor seems to be arguing that Kepler's Christian philosophical assumptions led to a successful scientific discovery, but that "philosophical constraints on the interpretation of data are inconsistent with the scientific method."

If Kepler had been a Deist - where a first cause God creates an intelligible Universe but doesn't intervene in it thereafter - there wouldn't be much difference between that and the philosophical assumption of methodological naturalism; namely, that the observable phenomena of nature are best explained by reference to natural causes. In the words of geology professor Steven D. Schafersman, methodological naturalism is:

...the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it … science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success ... but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is.

One more point of contention: Egnor claims that philosophical reflection on the data is consistent with the scientific method, but then calls the claim that philosophical naturalism is true a "bizarre inference," claiming that science has revealed that the universe was created out of nothing, that the properties of the Universe are fine-tuned to allow the existence of life, and that DNA has been shown to be too much like computer software that creates "intricate nanotechnology."

With regards to cosmology, science has not definitively revealed that the Universe was created out of nothing; at worst they say they don't know, and at best they attempt to formulate hypotheses that can be tested in order to discover the origin of the Universe. In terms of the alleged fine-tuning of the fundamental principles of the Universe being preset to ensure that sentient life will emerge, the most obvious answer is that if they principles didn't happen to be what they are, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Some thinkers aren't satisfied with this answer, however, and cite the improbability of a Universe coming into existence with principles that do allow for such life to emerge. But simply acknowledging that the Universe appears to have been fine-tuned for life to emerge does not mean that one has to conclude exclusively that a supernatural God did it. It is just as probable that we are living inside a simulation (à la The Matrix) created by an advanced extraterrestrial form of intelligent life than a supernatural God who is somehow mysteriously outside of nature. There's as much "evidence" for that as there is for a creator God. And in terms of DNA being an irreducibly complex computer program that appears to have been designed as is, it should be noted that scientists are actively working on discovering the evolution of DNA. The RNA World Hypothesis is one such attempt. They are not throwing up their hands and saying, "God did it." That's not science.

Egnor ends his piece with the following:

Here’s the atheist interpretation of this scientific evidence: atheism is the only permissible explanation. Atheists are entitled to their opinion, but they have no business teaching students that atheist fundamentalism defines the limits of science.

I'm an atheist, but I am not an atheist who brings his interpretation to the scientific evidence; I am an atheist largely because of the scientific evidence. As Egnor himself says, "philosophical reflection on the data" is consistent with the scientific method. I don't think that atheism is the only permissible explanation, but I do think it's the most likely. There seems to be an overwhelming preponderance of evidence for the truth of (metaphysical) naturalism, and a paucity of evidence for the Christian God specifically, and the supernatural generally.

Science educators are not teaching atheist fundamentalism to students; on the contrary, they are presenting the overwhelming evidence for the veracity of such things as evolution by natural selection as opposed to the scant (and mostly refuted) evidence for Intelligent Design.

If there was overwhelming evidence for Intelligent Design, it should be taught. But then that would necessarily "naturalize" God - I mean the Intelligent Designer...

Technorati tags:

Intelligent Design, methodological naturalism, philosophical naturalsim, atheism, Michael Egnor

Fundamentalism in Science Education?

2007-10-26T08:07:00.000-05:00

The Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle, has published an article titled "Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education" on its Evolution: News & Views website.

The article criticizes SUNY professor Massimo Pigliucci - who has PhDs in genetics, botany and philosophy - and who wrote an essay titled "The Evolution-Creation Wars" for the McGill Journal for Education.

Here is the abstract for the essay:

The creation-evolution “controversy” has been with us for more than a century. Here I argue that merely teaching more science will probably not improve the situation; we need to understand the controversy as part of a broader problem with public acceptance of pseudoscience, and respond by teaching how science works as a method. Critical thinking is difficult to teach, but educators can rely on increasing evidence from neurobiology about how the brain learns, or fails to.

The Evolution: News & Views article was written by Michael Egnor, a colleague of Dr. Pigliucci's at SUNY. Egnor takes issue with several of Pigliucci's assertions and characterizations in his essay, namely: the conflation of Creationism with Intelligent Design; and that a better science education is a "tonic against belief in Heaven"; the conflation of philosophical naturalism with methodological naturalism. Additionally, Egnor claims that it is misleading for Pigliucci to claim that there is no controversy over the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Allow me to address these issues in turn:

First, I actually agree with Egnor that "Creationism" and "Intelligent design" are ostensibly different things; however, the history behind the Intelligent Design movement puts the lie to the prima facie difference between the two.

The seeds of the Intelligent Design movement have been shown to be found in the Supreme Court case of Edwards vs. Aguillard (1987), where the Court ruled

that a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught in public schools whenever evolution was taught was unconstitutional, because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion. At the same time, however, it held that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."

One of the textbooks the creationism advocates proposed to be used was Of Pandas and People, which was originally published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, whose original purpose was "promoting and publishing textbooks presenting a Christian perspective." The defeat in the Edwards vs. Aguillard case led the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement - who are also the leaders of The Discovery Institute - to substitute the references to creationism and creation science with Intelligent Design. As noted in the more recent court case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District (2005):

As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge:

(1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID;

(2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and

(3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content .... The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted, that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision."

As if that wasn't enough to indict the Intelligent Design movement, there is the infamous Wedge strategy, the goal of which is

To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.

To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

So for Egnor to claim that "Intelligent design isn’t a religious belief" is the height of disingenuousness; an accusation he himself levels at Pigliucci.

Additionally, he claims that Pigliucci's assertion that a better science education would dissuade people of a belief in Heaven is "jaw-dropping." What is jaw-dropping is the fact that many adults (75% according to Pigliucci) still cling to a childhood notion of Heaven as a physical place. Egnor laments the fact that not only are scientists not investigating Heaven, but that it would be impossible for them to do so because the "natural world is the only domain to which science appertains." But if Egnor is a scientist, and if he claims that Heaven and the existence of an afterlife are not investigable by the methods of science, then how would anyone know that there is a Heaven?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The onus is on those who make an assertion. If someone says, "Heaven exists", it's only fair to ask, "What is your evidence?" It is not incumbent upon the scientists to go around disproving every outrageous claim. Egnor wonders how science could possibly prove the non-existence of things that are outside of nature. But since theists like Egnor make claims about things that purportedly exist outside of nature, a better question would be, "How can you prove the existence of things outside of nature?" An even better question would be, "Why would you want to teach such things to young people in a science class?"

I should also point out that, contrary to Egnor, what Pigliucci recommends as a "tonic" to unsupported beliefs about the world is not science education per se, but critical thinking. As Pigliucci notes in his essay:

The most revealing thing was that most of the non-science students in the survey (those with a lower belief in the paranormal) were in fact philosophy or psychology majors, who actually take courses on the scientific method and critical thinking.

Could it be that it's not just the amount of education (scientific or otherwise) that matters, but the way in which that education is administered?

He goes on to answer "yes" and then gives his reasons why.

Regarding Egnor's claim that Pigliucci is muddling the distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism, philosopher Barbara Forrest wrote a paper titled "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection", in which she writes:

In response to the charge that methodological naturalism in science logically requires the a priori adoption of a naturalistic metaphysics, I examine the question whether methodological naturalism entails philosophical naturalism. I conclude that the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion, given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.

In contrast, Egnor writes:

In point of fact, Dr. Pigliucci proposes to teach students philosophical naturalism veiled in scientific naturalism. His purpose is ideological....Fundamentalists of all stripes can't seem to keep their religious views out of science. Dr. Pigliucci — a professor of philosophy as well as of evolutionary biology — knows the difference between atheism and science. His choice not to be forthright about the difference is emblematic of the fundamentalist approach — the Darwinist approach — to science education.

But the simple fact is that Intelligent design is not science, and thus shouldn't be taught in science classes. Egnor further claims that there is a controversy over Intelligent Design:

The real controversy— and it is a raging controversy— is about intelligent design. Intelligent design is the scientific theory that there is evidence for intelligent agency in some aspects of biology, for example in the genetic code and in the intricate molecular machines inside cells.

Scientists who support intelligent design are a very small fraction of scientists, at least a small fraction of biologists. Yet the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinism is a scientific controversy.

But there is no controversy - certainly not a "raging" one; and he even admits that only a very small fraction of scientists support it. The controversy is all in the imagination of the supporters of Intelligent Design. In the scientific community - those who "do" science - there is no controversy. As philosopher Daniel C. Dennett sums it up:

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Dennett also addresses the issue of whether or not Intelligent Design is science, so I'll end this post with a few more comments from him:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

But we do know who the designer might be, thanks to their strategy outlined in the Wedge document noted at the beginning of this post: it's the Judeo-Christian God.

The Trojan Horse is alive and well, unfortunately.

Technorati tags:

Intelligent Design, Evolution, Darwinism, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Egnor, The Discovery Institute, Teach the Controversy

Euthyphro who?

2007-10-20T07:14:00.000-05:00

Does God choose what is morally good because it is good, or is "morally good" whatever God says it is?

I think many non-academic Christian apologists tend to underestimate the power of this simple question. Either that, or they don't understand it, or simply refuse to acknowledge its force. Granted, there are several permutations of the basic argument, but the central thrust remains the same: God is not required for morality.

Why? Because if God chooses what is morally good because it's good, then what is morally good is something separate from God; and if what is morally good is whatever God says it is, then morality is completely arbitrary. For instance, God could have chosen genocide as a moral good. In fact, a sample from the Christian Old Testament might well support the claim that God is in fact evil:

After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses' aide:"Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites. I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Great Sea on the west. No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life.

When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai. But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the LORD had instructed Joshua.

[Emphasis mine]

We can agree with Thomas Jefferson that the God of the Old Testament is indeed "a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust" - to say the least.

The church in which I grew up - in the tradition of the Plymouth Brethren - held what is called a dispensationalist view of the Bible. Basically, this is the view that says God is indeed immutable, but has chosen to deal with his people in different ways at different times. In other words, the God of the Old Testament needed to act in these barbaric ways - or to have his "chosen people" act in these barbaric ways - because it was necessary and fitting for such a people to be worthy of the land the Lord promised them. It's a fancy rationalization for saying that we cannot understand God's ways, so we better not question them.

But unless we are sociopaths, we rightly feel a nauseous abhorrence toward these acts of genocide. We felt that way about Adolf Hitler; we felt that way about Saddam Hussein. We see it today in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has either morphed from a religious conflict into a political one, or is a muddled mixture of religion and politics.

The impetus for this blog post came from a recent article in American Thinker, titled, "About Evil." The author attempts to defuse what is probably the most damning indictment of the Christian conception of God: the "problem of evil." I prefer to call it the "problem of suffering" because the word "evil" is, to me, a theological concept without any real meaning. The problem of suffering can be summed up thusly: if a personal God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then how can there be suffering in the world? Either God knows about it but is powerless to stop it, in which case he can't be omnipotent; or God doesn't know about it, in which case he is not omniscient; or God knows about it and could put a stop to it, but doesn't care to, in which case he is not omnibenevolent.

The article's author writes:

Then, when saying that we cannot believe in God because of the existence of evil, we accept a contradiction. If God doesn't exist, how can we label a position evil with credibility?

I think he's sidestepping the issue here. We don't need God to tell us that we suffer, that some things make us unhappy or cause us pain. These are facts of existence; it doesn't matter what we label them. And when the author writes that "for a standard to judge what is good and evil, it must be both outside and above them," this certainly applies to the concept of God as well. We judge God's actions as good or evil based on some standard other than God himself. We judge that it is wrong to kill "twelve thousand men and women" in a single day.

I think Christians would need to answer for the reprehensible moral behavior of their Old Testament God before they can claim that he is the standard for morality.

Instead of wasting time try to explain away the embarrassing bits of a 3,000 year-old compilation of dubious moral reasoning, I think we should get on with the very real task of figuring out how to live with each other in the here and now.

Technorati tags:

Selwyn Duke, Christian ethics, Euthyphro

On Militant Atheists

2007-10-07T10:20:00.001-05:00

One thing you have to say about the New Atheists is that they certainly have stirred the pot of public debate.

Yet another op/ed article - this one from The Los Angeles Times - again criticizes Dawkins, Harris, et al. The unambiguous title of the article is "Militant atheists are wrong," and its author attempts to show that such polemics against faith-based religion not only "[attack] our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves," but also "[attack] our right to believe in unseen, unprovable things at all." Furthermore, the author claims that this assault on religious belief "amounts to an attack on the human imagination."

First of all I'd like to say that it is patently false to claim that to attack irrational faith is to demolish or even hinder our ability to create value and meaning for ourselves. Has he never read the Existentialists? I don't feel I need to spend much time on this objection, because it seems I keep writing the same thing over and over again at this blog regarding just such a notion.

I'd like to move on to some of the author's increasingly more bizarre claims:

For the imagination is what embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness.

Yes, the imagination is that (seemingly) uniquely human capacity to form new ideas, images or concepts that do not necessarily exist in the 'outside' world; but that is not necessarily so. Philosophers and scientists have, since time immemorial, used 'thought experiments' to imagine all sorts of things. From Einstein's famous 'chasing the light beam' thought experiment to the Philosopher's Zombie, the human imagination has been recruited to imagine things that don't exist in reality, yet are still able to be tested and provide insight into real problems that lead to real solutions. The late American poet Wallace Stevens once said: "To be at the end of reality is not to be at the beginning of imagination, but to be at the end of both." It's true we can imagine all sorts of things that don't exist - from pink unicorns to Harry Potter's Dementors - but the human imagination is oftentimes eminently useful, and practically so.

Credo quia absurdum est. I believe because it is absurd. That sentiment -- either a corruption or a paraphrase of the saying of an early church father -- is the essence of religious belief. By taking a leap of faith in God, you create value out of nothingness. The more difficult it is to believe, the stronger the faith that flies in the face of absurdity. Your willingness to stake your life on the possibility of an impossibility makes a fact out of a fantasy.

I would agree with the author that credo quia absurdum est is in fact the essence of religious belief; but I don't believe that this is a good thing, or even a psychologically healthy thing. And of course I strongly disagree that by believing in God one creates value out of nothingness. What value has one created? I assume one could just as easily create the same type of value by believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

He's also correct to say that one's willingness to stake one's life on the impossibility of a belief does in fact create a fact out of fantasy. One need look no further than the 19 hijackers of 9/11. I'm sure they're enjoying their 72 virgins as we speak.

You don't have to be a religious person to cherish the idea of faith in the absurd. When artists have an unverifiable, unprovable inspiration, and then seek to convey it in words or images, they take a leap of faith every bit as vertiginous as that of the religious person.

Comparing the concept of religious faith to artistic inspiration is itself absurd. An artist has faith - that is, trust or hope - in the fruit of inspiration and, indeed, in the existence of inspiration itself, but it is not at all akin to religious faith, where belief in something is maintained without evidence or even in the teeth of contradictory evidence. He's comparing apples to oranges here. The religious believer and the creative artist may both experience vertigo, but the artist's vertigo is not likely to knock down skyscrapers full of innocent people.

The leap of faith is really a very ordinary operation. We take it every time we fall in love, expect kindness from someone, impulsively sacrifice some little piece of our self-interest. After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things.

I think the author's trying to have his cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, he says that faith is about believing something because it's absurd; while on the other hand he says that this is a very ordinary thing, comparing it to falling in love and treating people as you would want them to treat you. Now, I might be going out on a limb here, but I doubt most people would consider absurd such things as love, truth, beauty and goodness. And conflating inestimable with impossible seems to be the source of his confusion. In fact, there is an inestimable difference between what is impossible and what is only inestimable: the former doesn't exist; the latter is merely beyond comprehension.

Technorati tags:

militant atheism, faith

An Atheist's Answer to the Morality Question

2007-10-07T09:04:00.001-05:00

A freshman at Silliman College of Yale University recently penned an opinion article titled, "Anti-theists avoid morality question."

The freshman, Bryce Taylor, despite his talented writing, displays a naive understanding not only of what the New Atheists such as Dawkins and Harris are trying to accomplish with their books, but also an ignorance of the rich and diverse moral discussions taking place (and which have always taken place) within the non-believing community at large.

Sam Harris is primarily attacking irrational faith, and Dawkins is attempting to 'raise consciousness', as he puts it, of the delusional nature of faith-based religion. Neither of them spend a lot of time on arguments against the existence of God, and merely provide an overview or summary of arguments that have been better put many times before. They are not trying to reinvent the wheel, but are attempting to make cracks in the heretofore respectable façade of religious belief; and, further, that belief in God does not provide an objective foundation for morality either. Taylor is setting up these glaringly visible and outspoken atheists as straw men.

Getting to the question of morality, he writes:

Of course, Christians and other theists have raised the objection that naturalistic materialism — the notion that only the physical world exists — can provide no foundation for morality. That’s not to say that naturalists cannot behave morally, but merely that they can have no real and consistent reason for behaving morally. As this has been a long-standing and widespread objection to naturalism, it would seem only reasonable to expect atheists to devote careful attention to the question of morality.

First of all, as Plato demonstrated centuries ago - and centuries before the Christian religion - God cannot be the foundation for morality without morality becoming something completely arbitrary. Does God value what is morally good, or is moral goodness whatever God says it is? If it's the former, then morality is independent of God; if it's the latter, then moral goodness is arbitrary. God could have chosen torture as a moral 'good.' In fact, that may even be the case, given the predilections of the God of the Old Testament.

Secondly, atheistic naturalists have devoted a considerable amount of time and effort into formulating a naturalistic morality. In fact, ever since Darwin published his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, naturalists have attempted to discover or at least construct and defend a naturalistic morality.

The main problem with trying to ground a naturalistic morality is encapsulated in the dictum, you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'; that is to say, science (the epistemological basis for naturalism) only tells us what is - it is descriptive - whereas moral reasoning attempts to tell us what we ought to do - it is prescriptive. There is no logical way to get to what ought to be by simply describing what is. However, one of the most thorough (and most recent) attempts at promulgating a naturalistic morality can be found in Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul. He devotes an entire chapter to the problem: "Ethics as Human Ecology."

Flanagan acknowledges the challenge:

What is the rational basis for our urges for meaning and goodness? Isn't naturalism required to say that human life in fact has no real meaning and that morality, at least as it is commonly understood, makes no sense?

The naturalist must provide an answer to these questions and quell the associated fears.

The problem for the naturalist is to offer a way of thinking about value, meaning, and worth - moral and nonmoral - that has substance and objectivity.

Flanagan then goes on to describe his conception of a naturalistic morality as a form of ecology:

And ecology is the science that studies how living systems relate to each other and to their environment, and so is the relevant analogy.

Ethics, as I conceive it, is systematic inquiry into the conditions (of the world, of individual persons, and of groups of persons) that permit humans to flourish.

Observations of humans over history discovers flourishing to be their aim, and living meaningfully and morally to be conditions of doing so.

What makes such inquiry empirical is that it starts from an understanding of human nature as revealed by evolutionary biology, mind science, sociology, anthropology and history. So the first reason why it is helpful to conceive of ethics as empirical is that it allows us to use actual observation, rather than revealed and traditional wisdom, to determine what outcomes are most reasonably judged good.

So, needless to say, naturalistic materialists have given considerable thought to secular ethics.

Taylor concludes:

Ultimately, there are two fundamental questions about morality: Is it real, and if so, where does it come from?

Thus, most naturalists, including those mentioned above, would reply in the affirmative. The problem then becomes the second question: Where does this morality come from?

Until they argue convincingly for a naturalistic foundation for morality, anti-theists like Dawkins and Harris would do best to admit with Ivan Karamazov that “there is no virtue if there is no immortality” — or, more to the point, there is no morality if there is no God.

Yes, the naturalistic materialist will answer that morality is real, but it is not independent of human nature. Additionally, the naturalistic materialist will say that, wherever morality comes from, it most certainly doesn't come from God - Plato's Euthyphro's dilemma and a random selection of Old Testament passages can attest to that.

I'm sorry that Taylor remains unconvinced of a naturalistic foundation for morality. I strongly recommend that he read Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul, as well as the prolific writings of Alonzo Fyfe over at the Atheist Ethicist blog.

But since he is only a freshman, and since he appears to be an intelligent and thoughtful young man, I sincerely hope that for at least the next three years his mind remains open to the very real possibility of having and living a moral life without God or gods.

Technorati tags:

naturalism, atheism, materialism, morality

Humanist Recognition

2007-10-07T07:51:00.000-05:00

Back in September, Brandeis University in Massachusetts officially opened its first Humanist chapter.

As the University's community newspaper reported:

Humanism is a secular ethical philosophy. It endorses a universal morality without a basis in religion and includes such sub-categories as atheists and agnostics.

[Joyce ] Wang '10 says, “I feel that the idea of a secular existence is really powerful. It’s very life-affirming and meaningful to me, but Humanism, especially as it relates to atheists and agnostics, tends to have a fairly negative public image. It's important for communities to know that just because we are secular doesn't mean that we're immoral.”

Wang emphasized the importance of a secular community, saying, “Brandeis is a place that prides itself in celebrating religious diversity, but before Brandeis Humanists, there was no organization devoted to a specifically secular way of life. I think it's important that we offer that alternative point of view, and that we're able to provide a welcoming community for those students who do not happen to participate in religious life.”

I applaud the students' efforts at organizing such a chapter and promoting a realistic vision for how human beings can achieve an authentic flourishing life as physical, completely embodied animals, as well as affirming that human beings are indeed capable of living a less fragmented and meaningful life without recourse to other-worldly gods or motivations.

Technorati tags:

Humanism, Brandeis University

Atheism vs. Religion

2007-10-07T06:57:00.000-05:00

Via Friendly Atheist, I found these two 'advertisements', if you will, and I thought it was a humorous yet accurate example of why atheists will never de-convert true believers, and why true believers will never convert atheists.

To be fair, I would probably change the word 'Religion' in the above picture to 'Western Religion' or 'Monotheistic Religion.' I say this because even though I am an atheist, I have an affinity for those Eastern religions whose impetus was the fact of human suffering and whose goal was liberation from that suffering; whereas Western, monotheistic religions have as their impetus alleged revelation from the Creator of the universe; and instead of attempting to alleviate human suffering in the here-and-now, the goal is to convert-or-suffer for eternity. Indeed, suffering - and even death - in this world virtually guarantees entry into, and happiness within, the 'next world.'

Additionally, I would note that the so-called 'New Atheists' aren't necessarily attempting to disprove religious claims, but instead are trying to secure a well-deserved seat at the table of public and political discourse.

Technorati tags:

atheism, religion

Deepak's Black Box of Wishful Thinking

2007-10-06T07:46:00.001-05:00

Deepak Chopra has a blog post over at The Huffington Post titled, "Genes and the Black Box." In it, he describes a recent study by UCLA researchers on the relation between genes and loneliness. Although he doesn't cite his source, I assume he's talking about this study:

Loneliness is gene deep, its molecular signature is reflected in the lonely person's DNA. This was the conclusion of a new US study by scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and other US academic centres.

Scientists already know that social environments affect health. People who are lonely and socially isolated die earlier.

Cole and the other researchers found that changes in the way immune cells express their genes were directly linked to the "subjective experience of social distance".

Now I'm no geneticist - nor, to my knowledge, is Deepak - but he wonders how "a mental perception ("I am lonely") can trigger genes into becoming active." He contends that it's so much of a mystery that it's comparable to an inscrutable black box:

What they are confronting is close to a classic "black box experiment." Something is put into the box, an unknown object, and the purpose of the experiment is to guess what it is. The only way to find out is by tapping on the box, weighing it, listening to the object as you rattle it around.

He does, however, acknowledge that modern neuroscience has developed ever more sophisticated methods - such as fMRI and PET scans - methods for tracking the activity of the brain, activity which includes such things as thoughts and emotions. But he goes on to speculate that, since we haven't (yet) explained everything down to the last detail, that this leaves open perhaps the greatest mystery of all: the mystery of human free will and human choice:

The best news is that this mystery exists at all since strict materialists push the dogma that genes are controllers of the body and of behavior, which covertly deprives us of free will and choices.

I'd like to point out that how something in the environment - in this case social isolation - affects the physical processes of the brain needn't be a mystery, even if that 'something' is a subjective experience. If I happen across the mangled, lifeless body of a dead fawn on my early morning walk to work and feel a twinge of nausea, I don't think there is any mystery as to why my subjective experience of the premature and violent death of a young animal caused a physical reaction in me.

While it may be true that we aren't able to trace the complete line of causation as it relates to how a subjective experience affects something physical like genes, that's not to say that we won't some day be able to; and it's no reason to therefore assume that this gap in our understanding should be filled with something for which there is little or no evidence. It's akin to intelligent design proponents claiming that since there is a gap in our understanding of how a certain complex component of biology could have been produced by natural selection, it must therefore have been the product of an intelligent designer.

If there is a gap in understanding, it is certainly helpful - if not essential - to speculate; but when there is no reason to favor one hypothesis over another, quietism would be the proper attitude until further information becomes available.

Chopra does come close to this attitude at the conclusion of his post:

For the moment, genes represent the most fascinating black box experiment in all of science, and when the box is opened some day in the future, a new synthesis of free will and determinism is bound to emerge.

But there is already a philosophical synthesis of free will and determinism, and it's known as compatibilism:

Do we have free will? It depends what you mean by the word 'free'. According to compatibilists, we do have free will. They propound a sense of the word 'free' according to which free will is compatible with determinism, even though determinism is the view that the history of the universe is fixed in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does because everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before.

They believe that to have free will, to be a free agent, to be free in choice and action, is simply to be free from constraints of certain sorts. Freedom is a matter of not being physically or psychologically forced or compelled to do what one does. Your character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set may be entirely determined by events for which you are in no way responsible (by your genetic inheritance, upbringing, subsequent experience, and so on). But you do not have to be in control of any of these things in order to have compatibilist freedom. They do not constrain or compel you, because compatibilist freedom is just a matter of being able to choose and act in the way one prefers or thinks best given how one is. As its name declares, it is compatible with determinism. It is compatible with determinism even though it follows from determinism that every aspect of your character, and everything you will ever do, was already inevitable before you were born.

So we don't need to indulge in wild speculations, such as the one made by the character of Ben on the TV show LOST:

Ben: I can show you things. Things I know you want to see very badly. Let me put it so you'll understand. Picture a box. You know something about boxes, don't you, John? What if I told you that somewhere on this island, there's a very large box... and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it, when you opened that box, there it would be. What would you say about that, John?

Technorati tags:

Deepak Chopra, free will, determinism

What if...

2007-10-06T06:33:00.000-05:00

...some night a demon were to approach you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you:

"This life as you now live it, and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider in this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it..."

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him:

"You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!"

This little thought experiment comes from 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he dubbed it the idea of eternal recurrence.

I suppose it has little to do with naturalism; but on the other hand, if this is truly the only life we have, if there is no heaven or hell or other type of afterlife, would you welcome such a proposition?

It's not a choice between living a heavenly life and repeating this current life over and over. It's more of a choice between living one's own unique life with all its pleasures and pains - and complete annihilation, the complete cessation of existence.

I think it cuts right to the heart of what it means to be a human being. It was the 20th Century French philosopher Albert Camus who said in one of his essays that "judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

I think it reminds us to reflect on our lives and to remember those "tremendous moments", especially when life is going less than optimally.

What would you answer?

'Average Atheist' is a Straw Man

2007-09-24T18:39:00.001-05:00

Last week there was an Op/Ed letter titled "Naive atheists note: it's all in your genes", posted on one of Ireland's online news magazines, Independent.ie.

The letter claims to characterize the "average atheist" as naive, thinking that all religion is bad and that there is no downside to atheism. What the author has set up is an easily vanquished straw man. There is no such thing as an "average atheist," there is just a continuum of people without belief in gods, but with varying opinions of specific religions and religion in general.

The author begins with the idea that atheists hold the 'conceit' that the concept of God can be eliminated from the mind of human beings forever, and that this would constitute the supreme good for humanity. Speaking as a representative of the atheist community, I have to say that very few atheists hold this view. It may be true that we wish that purely faith-based, irrational religion would be eradicated, but we don't believe this will happen any time soon, if ever. Additionally, we know that much bad (I won't call it 'evil') can be done by both believers and non-believers, so a world full of atheists does not guarantee any kind of moral Utopia. But it's true that many, if not most, atheists view religion as a "source of superstition, prejudice and irrationality." Is the idea of sacrificial atonement not superstitious? Was the practice and condonation of slavery by the antebellum Southern states of America not based on prejudice - and justified by recourse to scripture? Is it rational to believe that the sin of one man somehow accrues to all men, as if there were an 'original sin' gene?

The author also claims that the average atheist believes that any good that religion does is merely accidental, and that non-believers could do even better. We don't believe that the good done by religious believers is accidental; on the contrary, we believe that believers do good because they operate on humanist principles and rightly reject the obviously abhorrent morality of the Bible - especially the Old Testament. What they do is not accidental; it is merely cherry-picking the good parts.

One of the most offensive things the author says - or at least insinuates - is the following:

But the fact is that the forces of anti-religion are almost always led by atheists and, in living memory, they have used the utmost force to try and apply a final solution to religion.

If by 'final solution' he is obliquely referring to Hitler's holocaust, then he has a woefully naive understanding of Hitler's motivations. I don't think any atheists would be wearing this fashionable belt buckle:

The translation is: "God with Us." And there is more evidence for Hitler's connection to religion, and to Christianity in particular.

The author also makes a muddle of a couple of other issues: he says that it logically follows that one has to give up the idea of free will and objective morality if one gives up belief in God. It does not logically follow that if one gives up belief in God then one has to stop believing in free will. In fact, there are arguments that suggest that if such a God as the Judeo-Christian Bible exists, then humans don't have free will anyway. But there are other reasons, completely divorced from the concept of God, for giving up the idea of free will. I touched on some of these in a recent post.

In terms of giving up the idea of an objective morality, one can argue, as Plato did in his Euthyphro dilemma, that God cannot be the source of objective morality anyway. English philosopher Julian Baggini sums it up nicely for us:

Where then does this morality come from? It is tempting to say that moral law has its own lawgiver and judiciary. But the same questions that were asked about the law can be asked about the moral law: what is it that guarantees moral laws are indeed moral? It must be because the moral law-enactors and enforcers are acting within the confines of morality. But this then makes morality prior to any moral legislature or judiciary. To put it another way, the only thing that can show a lawgiver is moral is that their laws conform to a moral standard which is independent of the moral lawgiver. So if the lawgiver is God, God's laws will only be moral if they conform to moral principles which are independent of God.

Plato made this point extremely clearly in a dialogue called Euthypryo, after which the following dilemma was named. Plato's protagonist Socrates posed the question, do the gods choose what is good because it is good, or is the good good because the gods choose it? If the first option is true, that shows that the good is independent of the gods (or in a monotheistic faith, God). Good just is good and that is precisely why a good God will always choose it. But if the second option is true, then that makes the very idea of what is good arbitrary. If it is God's choosing something alone that makes it good, then what is there to stop God choosing torture, for instance, and thus making it good? This is of course absurd, but the reason why it is absurd is that we believe that torture is wrong and that is why God would never choose it. To recognize this, however, is to recognize that we do not need God to determine right and wrong. Torture is not wrong just because God does not choose it.

To my mind, the Euthypryo dilemma is a very powerful argument against the idea that God is required for morality. Indeed, it goes further and shows that God cannot be the source of morality without morality becoming something arbitrary.

In terms of an atheist's view of objective morality, I can only speak for myself, and make the reasonable assumption that most thorough-going atheists don't believe there is an objective morality independent of human nature. I'll refer readers to my post "Is there a Moral Law?"

Not only does the author have a very naive view of atheists but of human nature as well. He sets up the extreme form of reductionism as another easily vanquished straw man. He thinks that if the idea of God is given up, then everything that makes us human is gone, and he doesn't understand how human genes can build a brain that is flexible enough to respond to an ever-changing physical and social environment.

When you ditch belief in God you are left with the idea that matter and energy are all that exist. Everything you do is the result of your genes reacting with the environment.

It is true that matter and energy are all that exist, but this view is not a logical consequence of ditching belief in God. A human being is fully embedded in the web of causal interaction which acts on all beings and objects in nature. Human beings are natural objects, made out of the same 'stuff' as everything else in the universe and so are subject to the same natural laws. But tracing all of the causal connections that go to make up a human being - all her thoughts, beliefs and actions - is something that is currently (and perhaps forever) beyond our mental capabilities. Human thought and action is a complex result of both internal and external forces. It has been said that the human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, each with hundreds of connections to neighboring neurons; and while we may be able to describe the causal activity of a single neuron, describing the causal activity of trillions of connections is not something we are able to do. But given the magnitude and complexity of the 'circuitry' of the brain, it's not difficult to see that this could potentially give rise to a near-infinite repertoire of human behavior and action.

The author then ends with a final stroke of arrogance:

Naive Atheists, such as the ones who write to this paper, seem blissfully unaware of the demands atheism makes of them, of the sort of beliefs they must surrender once they give up belief in God.

Now they know better.

If you want to consider me to be representative of an 'average atheist', then you would have to realize that I am neither naive nor blissfully unaware of the demands my atheism places on me. I don't know what type of atheists write into the author's paper, but it would seem to me that most people who call themselves atheists have given considerable thought to their atheism, and the consequences of calling themselves atheists, given the current climate (at least in the States) where the very term 'atheist' has become a pejorative.

This author's article is clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Technorati tags:

naive atheists, atheism, naturalism, free will, determinism, morality

The Carousel of the Free Will Debate

2007-09-23T10:38:00.001-05:00

The Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation interested in brain science, is sponsoring a debate called "Seeking Free Will in Our Brains", pitting a neurologist against a psychiatrist.

It's probably not surprising that the neurologist, Mark Hallett, allies with the side of the debate that claims the human feeling of free will is an illusion of some sort. He presents the standard view that since the 'mind is what the brain does', and since the brain is a physical organ, then there is no such thing as free will - or that at least the feeling of free will is an illusion, albeit a powerful one.

The psychiatrist, Paul R. McHugh, on the other hand, questions whether or not he (or anyone) should be carrying the burden of proof when they claim that they have free will. He says:

First: the project seemed rhetorically backward. Should I be carrying the burden of proof here? The conscious mind and all the mental experiences tied to freedom of the will—choosing, deciding, hoping, deliberating, fearing, and cooperating with others—seem as self-evident as the five senses. No one asks us to prove them “real,” especially before hearing evidence that would claim they are not.

I have a significant amount of sympathy for people who are still tied to the idea of free will, especially since it seems so counter-intuitive to deny it. But there have been many things in the history of human thought that have been counter-intuitive yet have been shown to be undoubtedly true: the earth is indeed not flat, nor does the sun revolve around the earth; the appearance of design in the biological world can be accomplished by the natural process of evolution; we don't actually 'see' colors or 'hear' sounds, but our brains translate wavelengths of light and vibrations of air into color and sound, respectively.

McHugh goes on to differentiate between two types of patients with whom he typically works - those whose mental difficulties arise from what he calls 'material' causes such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and schizophrenia; and those who apparently aren't as organically compromised, one might say, such as anorexics, addicts and what he calls the 'demoralized.' He claims that these patients can provide 'reasons' for their mental distress, and although he claims he's not denying that the brain is involved, he claims they are (presumably moral) agents "responding to the distressing differences between what they want and what life delivers", and that they do, in fact, possess freedom of the will - it's just misused:

Come see these patients where choices are the problem and where they defend their choices with arguments that frustrate their recovery. Freedom they have in abundance; it’s wisdom they lack.

Additionally, he cautions against an overly optimistic view of the ability of science to solve all mysteries to our collective satisfaction:

Certain philosophers and some of their neuroscience students reject this naturalistic defense of freedom by noting that it rests on descriptions of mental experiences. But, say they, brain material produces all mental phenomena, including consciousness and its expressions. These psychological “effects” emerge from the complex, mechanistic, causal apparatus that is the brain. Therefore, like all “effects” in nature, they must be lawfully determined by their “causes.” What people do—and believe they choose to do—is inexorably determined by brain conditions present and past. A new predestination is born, as all psychological freedom, sensed or supposed, is illusionary.

On hearing this argument (and some form of it is far from original or even contemporary, given that Spinoza argued in similar ways), I’m struck by how it is built on presumptions rather than on a body of fact or neuroscientific discovery. Its champions presume that eventually, given the steady progress that they anticipate, neuroscientists will know all about the brain and see how mental productions are like all other productions of the body. This argument dismisses as simply a matter of the moment our present vast ignorance of just how the brain relates to mental phenomena.

It is undoubtedly true that we do not have a mature science of consciousness, or even a mature science of the brain in general; but we have made great strides in the last two decades, and this fuels much of the optimism. But the argument, and the presumptions about which he speaks, (particularly the reference to Spinoza), does not have to be new or a posteriori to be legitimate or carry force. If the quote from Spinoza to which he refers is that "men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire," it seems undoubtedly true. Or, as Nietzsche put it:

The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway...the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

Despite the typical Nietzschean flamboyance and hyperbole, he makes a good point; i.e., true freedom of the will would involve something that is apparently impossible - to be the cause of oneself in the most essential way. One can understand this sitting in one's armchair, as they say, so one needn't perform experiments or take observations to do so. It can be considered a priori as opposed to a posteriori.

McHugh goes on to compare the difference between what we know about how the kidney produces urine to how the brain produces conscious mental life: it's not just that we lack the facts of the matter, but that we seem to lack any conception about how the brain produces consciousness.

I think he draws an important distinction here. There are many theorists today working on the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how can purely physical processes of the brain give rise to subjective experiences? Why does there have to be subjective experiences at all? He correctly says that while we may have correlations between the physiology of neurons and brain systems and certain conscious experiences (what researchers in the field call the Neural Correlates of Consciousness), we have not been able to show that certain activity in certain areas of the brain are the conscious parts, you might say. We have not been able to find a consciousness module or a set of consciousness neurons. But from this McHugh then concludes that any such hope that we will amounts to 'fantasy,' and that investigators into this type of phenomenon "work happily away within the idiom of their successes, while ignoring issues that may demand reasoning with new idioms carrying new implications."

First of all, if a scientist threw up her arms and said that it's all fantasy, her PhD wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on. That's not science. When science faces a seemingly intractable problem, the solution isn't to quit but to say "I don't know" for the moment and keep working on the problem, thinking up new hypotheses to be tested, revising and tweaking old hypotheses, or simply waiting until new and advanced technology provides additional leverage for working on the problem. In Sue Blackmore's eminently readable book, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, she writes:

The confusion [regarding the 'hard problem' of consciousness] we have reached is deep and serious, and I suspect it reveals fundamental flaws in the way we normally think about consciousness. Perhaps we need to throw out the most basic assumptions and start all over again.

I want to quote McHugh's final remarks on the matter, and then address the points he makes in them.

I look for the time when neuroscientists will turn to explain how the material world can evoke these wonderful characteristics of human beings and will abandon any thought of them as illusionary.

Freedom is an expression of reasoning by subjects who realize that their choices determine what they make of themselves and are ready to accept the responsibility for what they fashion. To think otherwise is to give oneself over to predestination.

Ultimately in a choice between freedom and predestination, I’m for freedom and the proposition it entails—that we’re responsible for making the world what it is. Indeed, this proposition organizes and justifies the therapies that psychiatrists direct.

In regard to the nature of the term 'illusion' - according to the Dictionary on my Macbook here, an illusion is "a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses." So we needn't worry about using the term 'illusion' when describing free will, because it doesn't mean that the phenomenon of free will doesn't exist, just that it isn't what we think it is.

I agree with him that freedom is the expression of reasoning and deliberation by subjects who are aware that their decisions determine (to some extent) who they are, and that they feel a sense of responsibility for their decisions and choices. In saying this, he comes close to the position philosophers call 'compatibilism': free will is possible in a deterministic world, but they define 'free' very specifically. To a compatibilist, free will is the recognition that human beings are complex subjects who deliberate and act in the world, and that to be free is to perform actions voluntarily based on one's own reasons. You are free of constraints, coercion, and psychological compulsion to do what you desire to do. But as Spinoza (and others) said, we are not free to determine what we desire - we are ignorant of the causes which led us to desire thus, and therefore are not free to decide what we desire.

I don't wish to denigrate the practice of psychiatry or psychotherapy; I think that they are valid ways to alter unwanted behavior. However, if the mental distress one is feeling is a result of something that can best be 'cured' by pharmaceutical intervention, then it would be advisable to use it. And I know there is some intermingling of psychotherapy and drug therapy, especially in regard to mood disorders such as depression.

But even though behavior is fully caused - fully determined - that doesn't mean that behavior can't be changed. Certain types of psychotherapy, or even life events in general, can alter our behavior, sometimes in significant ways. Our best science tells us that our genes have produced a brain that is flexible and sensitive to the environment, which includes both human and non-human interaction. So I don't believe that the justification for McHugh's profession is lost if we are fully caused, natural animals - human animals. Indeed, in some respects his profession is more justified because we are animals whose behavior can be modified by such methods.

Finally, I would like to note that just because we cannot yet fully explain something such as consciousness or free will, it doesn't mean that therefore the idea that we do have free will is the default position. It just means we have more work to do.

Technorati tags:

free will, determinism, naturalism, The Dana Foundation, Mark Hallett, Paul R. McHugh

The New Humanism

2007-09-23T10:02:00.000-05:00

In a previous post I referenced Edge.org publisher, John Brockman, and his 2003 book The New Humanists: Science at the Edge.

In Brockman's own essay, which opens the book, he describes what he calls the "third culture"; the first culture being the intellectuals of the humanities, and the second culture being the scientists of the "hard" sciences. The third culture, as Brockman describes it, "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

He claims that the "arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture."

The type of humanism to which Brockman refers is actually the specific academic disciplines of literature, history, philosophy/religion, visual and performing arts - commonly referred to as "academia." The type of humanism I address here in this blog is more a broad group of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical philosophies that appeal to the unique and universal human qualities. But I want to talk a little bit about Brockman's thesis before discussing the type of humanism I countenance, and how it may or may not relate to Brockman's articulation of humanism.

Brockman's speculation is an interesting intellectual indulgence in and of itself. He claims that in the Renaissance era (approximately the 15th Century) of human history, the word "humanism" was part of one intellectual whole which encompassed both the humanities and the sciences (think Leonardo, Michelangelo, etc.). But he feels that the 20th Century regressed somewhat:

In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world - of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art - the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum - and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

I was an undergraduate from 1990 to 1994 at a small liberal arts college. My major was accounting and my minor was philosophy. My declared major in the beginning was computer science (or whatever it was called at my school), but I quickly dropped that when it became too abstract for my own tastes. But I do remember taking calculus and an introductory biology course; I don't remember much science beyond that - unless you include some of the 'softer' math like economics, statistics, and financial equations that were part of an education in accounting. Most of my curriculum was occupied with courses in literature, history, art history, psychology and philosophy. So I guess his claim appears somewhat reasonable, at least from my academic experience.

Brockman goes on to claim:

There are encouraging signs that the third culture now includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges. They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics - a whole panoply of humanist concerns - need to take the sciences into account.

I personally think this is a good development. Brockman's unspoken assumption is that these people have a naturalistic view of the world, because they are using the methodology of science to explore their respective disciplines. In keeping with Brockman's vision of his Edge Foundation's project where the participants are "key thinkers in various fields...who are arguing with each other, learning from each other," he is not without his detractors, even within his own volume here:

John Horgan: If you essay was meant to provoke, it obviously succeeded. But it really works more as a kind of Nike ad for science than a serious analysis of science's relation to the humanities or culture as a whole...If people would rather read about Virginia Woolf's sex life - or watch Friends, for that matter - than wrestle with A Brief History of Time or The Origins of Order, I don't think they should have to feel like second class citizens.

Timothy Taylor: One has to confront the tricky problem that popular science often either preaches to the converted or, when it strays into more "humanistic" domains, makes an unwitting ass of itself....A real victory for science would consist not in sweeping away other aspects of existence, such as religion (not that it has any hope of doing so) but in respectfully deepening understanding of what it is to live and die as a human being and observing the universe from that perspective.

Marc D. Hauser: I read "The New Humanists" with interest, but actually think you have painted a caricature of both scientists and humanists...I am often shocked and appalled by scientists who have never read some of the classics of literature, who know little about history, who continue to ignore insights from philosophy. The finger can be pointed both ways.

And that's just a sample. The thing I like most about Brockman's project is precisely this kind of argument and debate. That's how progress gets made, ultimately. This is in stark contrast to the discourse that takes place within religious circles - at least within fundamentalist religious circles. I'm not comfortable speaking about more liberal religious thinkers, about whose discourse I know very little.

But I want to say a final word about what I would call the new "humanism." To me, the term "humanism" could first of all be characterized by a naturalistic world-view, which itself is built on the methodology of science: i.e., evidence-based empiricism. Additionally, it would eschew supernatural theories about nature and human nature in its attempts to address human as well as planetary concerns. By human concerns, I mean both pressing concerns such as poverty, war, and public policy; and more secondary concerns like meaning and purpose. It would encompass the humanities as a way of enriching and exploring the human experience, and it would utilize the scientific mindset to provide a springboard for further exploration in the humanities.

As Brockman indicates, many of the thinkers in his book come from a diversity of backgrounds, from both the 'humanities' and the 'sciences'; but the common thread in all of them is the naturalistic world-view. They look for natural explanations of phenomena, believing (rightly, in my opinion) that supernatural explanations are really explanatory dead ends: non sequitur deus ex machinas, if you will.

So while on this blog I promote and the world-view known as Naturalism, I sometimes wonder if there is a better term to describe it. The problem with the term 'naturalist' is that it, like so much in the English language, admits of several connotations: it could designate someone who is a student of the natural history of life; or someone who practices naturalism in art or literature; or someone who adopts philosophical naturalism - which would be the case with me. As I've noted in previous posts, and as Brockman's book shows, even the term 'humanist' can signify different domains. Even one of Brockman's essay detractors (Chris Anderson) highlights this problem when he says:

Are you sure you want to use the term "humanist" as a banner to unite under? [Richard] Dawkins's preferred banner of "atheist" has its own problems. If the goal is to reference Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, how about "Renaissance thinker"? Actually this would be a great forum for you to canvas alternatives. "Rationalist"? "Universalist"? There's a lot of historical baggage whichever way you turn.

Of course, there is also the term "Bright." Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett describes it as:

The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic — and life after death.

The term "bright" is a recent coinage by two brights in Sacramento, Calif., who thought our social group — which has a history stretching back to the Enlightenment, if not before — could stand an image-buffing and that a fresh name might help. Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view.

So it's not just a term, it's a movement. As an ethical atheist in today's America, I am sympathetic to the idea of a movement to gain a seat at the table of political and social discourse; but the term, as Dennett hints, is not without its controversy. I like the idea of coming up with a single umbrella term to unite the diversity of which Dennett speaks for political reasons, but I'm not convinced that the term 'bright' will accomplish this.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism had a good discussion of this concern at his blog Memeing Naturalism:

...those who are naturalists in all but name might consider coming out as such (although the countersuggestible among them likely won’t). Atheists, secular humanists, skeptics and freethinkers are basically naturalistic in their worldview; a science-based, rational, empirical naturalism is their philosophical lodestone, even if it isn’t always explicit. Naturalism simply names the worldview that holds the world is of a piece, not divided into the natural vs. the supernatural, and naturalists are simply those that subscribe to naturalism.

But again, do we really need another ism, in this case naturalism? Well, if it’s an accurate, convenient label for what you believe on careful consideration to be the case, make use of it. Not to name your worldview, after all, leaves it at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace of belief, what Susan Blackmore would call the “meme-o-sphere.”

Technorati tags:

humanism, naturalism, atheism

Is there a Moral Law?

2007-09-21T17:19:00.001-05:00

There seem to be two divergent trends in the world these days, at least in the realm of human nature; namely, the ever accumulating body of evidence from the sciences that humans are not so unique as we like to think, and a resurgence of the traditional religious assertion that human beings are categorically different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The main point of contention is human morality. Is it something that has evolved and has its beginnings in non-human primates, and possibly even certain non-primate animals? Or is it something implanted in us by God or some other intelligence at work in the universe?

One might ask what the significance of the debate is. Isn't this type of discussion merely the realm of pocket-protector-wearing scientists and bespectacled philosophers? Well, no. Opinions and beliefs about human morality invariably find their way into public policy. The increasing sophistication and precision of medical technology brings to the forefront heretofore unimagined ethical dilemmas; an increasingly visible and vocal homosexual populace challenges traditional human relationships; and the full-blown threat of terrorism and clash of ideologies makes us address cultural relativism.

By far the dominant view in America is that human morality is not only categorically different from anything that could be called morality in animals, but that God is the embodiment of, or the gold standard for, Morality with a capital 'M'. In other words, there is an objective Morality to which all human beings are bound; there is an independent standard by which we are able to judge right and wrong, good and evil. And this God is the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.

A consequence of this view is that we can therefore legitimately judge the actions of others, whether privately or publicly, and rebuke them with the sanction of Divine authority. Of course this has implications for public policy, as anyone who has access to a TV or a newspaper can plainly see.

But here we run into a problem: not everyone, even within the Judeo-Christian milieu, has the exact same ideas of what is right and what is wrong. It seems we can all agree that things like murder, rape, and theft are immoral and ought not to be done regardless of religious belief, or even no religious belief, if only for the reason that prescriptions against those things make civil society possible.

Alonzo Fyfe over at the Atheist Ethicist blog draws the distinction between morality and what he calls religious culture:

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

Prescriptions against things like murder, rape, and theft fall within the realm of morality, whereas things like what types of food or what types of consensual relationships are permissible fall within the realm of religious culture. I think many if not most Americans would be up in arms if they were forbidden to eat beef, pork or shellfish. On the other hand, our civil society would undoubtedly collapse into chaos if murder were legalized.

Of course, I'm stating the obvious here.

Many Christian laypeople as well as clergy turn to Christian apologist C.S. Lewis because he argued that human beings are intuitively aware of a standard of behavior to which they feel justified in holding their fellow human beings. He calls this the Law of Human Nature, or the Law of Right and Wrong. He claims that all humans possess this innate knowledge, even if they don't regularly follow it.

As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

Lewis anticipates the objection that what he's really talking about is the "herd instinct":

Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what if feels like to be prompted by instinct...it means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way...But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

He goes on to say that there may be two instincts, or impulses: a desire to help, and a desire to not help; but that there is a third thing involved, and this third thing is characterized by a feeling of 'ought': one ought to help even if one doesn't want to. Lewis wrote this in the mid-1940's; our concept of a herd instinct - or even instincts in general - has since been refined to a degree unimagined by Lewis.

Philosopher Tamler Sommers recently interviewed primatologist Frans de Waal for The Believer magazine. From Sommers' introduction to the interview:

Until recently, biologists thought such complex behavior—behavior with an undeniable moral dimension—was exclusive to human beings. As much as anyone in the world, the primatologist Frans de Waal is responsible for changing this perception....de Waal has illustrated the uncanny similarities between human beings and our primate relatives. De Waal has not restricted himself to descriptions of behavior, however. He is famous for his willingness to enter into the largely taboo world of animal emotions, where research is routinely dismissed as “anthropomorphizing.” The result is an impressive array of evidence suggesting that we are not the only species to have moral feelings.

It is significant to note that serious studies of chimpanzee behavior did not take place until the 1970's, well after Lewis' informal treatise on Christianity; indeed, well after his death in 1963. But Lewis' engaging exposition is widely considered by many Christians to be a watertight case for the truth of Christianity, as well as for the truth of an objective standard of morality.

Secular moral philosophers throughout the ages have likewise attempted to discover an objective morality. They relied mainly on the power of human reason (or Reason with a capital 'R') to discover such a standard. However, the 18th Century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume argued convincingly that the proper domain of human reason covers things like mathematics and logic, while knowledge of the way things are in the world is derived from the senses. But neither of these methods can provide us with any set of principles for proper conduct. Morality thus falls under the domain of preference, and reason is then employed to justify our preferences. As Hume famously said: Reason is the servant of the passions.

But more on that in a minute.

Frans de Waal's work seems to indicate that the seeds of morality lie within our animal lineage:

BLVR: Much of your work recently has been aimed at correcting another misconception—that morality is exclusively a human invention, something that evolved long after we split from other apes. Do you think apes and bonobos are moral species? Do they exhibit moral behavior?

FDW: Well, I usually don’t call it moral behavior. I tend to call it building blocks or prerequisites for morality. I don’t think that chimpanzees are moral beings in the human sense. But they do have empathy, sympathy, reciprocity. They share food, resolve conflicts. All of these elements are present in human morality. So what I argue is that the basic psychology of the great apes is an essential element of human morality. Humans add things to that, making our morality far more complex. And that’s why I don’t want to call chimpanzees moral beings exactly.

BLVR: Meanwhile, your most recent book, Primates and Philosophers, attacks the view that human beings aren’t really moral, never mind nonhumans. You argue against the view that human morality is a thin veneer, a kind of cultural overlay or hypocritical mask covering our deeply selfish animal nature. You see this as fundamentally misguided because of the connection between our morality and animal emotions.

FDW: The interesting thing about my position is that it’s really the old Darwinian position: human morality is an outflow of primate sociality. That’s how Darwin saw it—it’s an outgrowth of the social instincts. It’s a moral sentimentalism—the view that emotions drive morality. In the last thirty years, people have abandoned that view. They all take this position that evolution could never have produced morality, because evolution produces only selfish, nasty, aggressive individuals. And obviously human morality is a way of going beyond that. But if you read Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, it’s very obvious that Darwin himself did not agree with this view at all.

Now this of course doesn't prove or even imply that there is an objective standard of morality independent of human nature. And neither does this understanding of human and animal behavior resemble the 'herd instinct' Lewis speaks of. Under de Waal's view, it's perfectly reasonable that something as complex as moral behavior could be thought of as an instinct (or a confluence of instincts); thus there's no need to posit a 'third thing' independent of natural human instincts.

Now getting back to the 'Reason is the servant of the passions' bit. Tamler Sommers also interviewed social and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who argues for what he calls the 'social intuitionist model' of morality, where we intuitively judge human thought and behavior first, and then attempt to justify our judgment with reasons. He further argues that we engage in providing reasons not to appeal to an objective standard of morality, but to convince others of the rightness of our judgment.

BLVR: I want to talk about the philosophical implications of your model for a moment. In particular, I thought the social intuitionist model makes plausible the claim that there is no such thing as objective moral truth, even though human beings believe that some of their moral judgments are objectively true.

JH: If anybody thinks that moral truths are going to be facts about the universe, that any rational creature on any planet would be bound by, then no such facts exist. I think that moral truths are like truths about beauty, truths about comedy. Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of the kinds of creatures we happen to be; the perceptual apparatus—apparati—that we happen to have. So moral facts emerge out of who we are in interaction with the people in our culture.

One of my favorite quotes is from Max Weber: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.” So I think that with morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is a real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy, but that’s true about money; that’s true about music; that’s true about most of the things that we care about.

So what de Waal and Haidt are saying has been misinterpreted as an objective Moral Law is really a predisposition of our nature as social animals, fueled by powerful intuitions which themselves are a result of emotions born of that same social interaction.

In other words, there is a Moral Law - but it is not objective and it is not independent of animal human nature.

Technorati tags:

morality, Frans de Waal, Jonathan Haidt, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Thoughts on Moral Psychology & Religion

2007-09-16T10:34:00.001-05:00

For anyone not familiar with the online magazine Edge, I highly recommend it. There you will find the most stimulating, thought-provoking, and controversial ideas by some of the best thinking minds out there. The Edge Foundation describes itself as:

Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.

The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.

The founder of The Edge Foundation, John Brockman, also edited and published The New Humanists: Science at the Edge, with essays by such humanist/naturalist thinkers as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett.

Edge is currently running an essay by Jonathan Haidt titled "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion." Haidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia who studies the relationship between morality and emotion, and how that relationship varies across cultures.

The relationship between moral reasoning, or even reasoning in general, and emotion is an interesting and little studied one; but one that was explored somewhat in-depth by one of my favorite authors, Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Damasio examines the extraordinary case of Phineas Gage, the 19th Century railroad construction worker whose ability to feel emotion was irretrievably altered after a tamping iron explosively entered his skull, damaging his brain. While Gage's intelligence remained intact, his ability to make rational decisions was severely impaired.

After providing a nice summary of the relation between emotion and moral reasoning, Haidt provides a distillation of his thinking on moral psychology with this definition:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

Haidt goes on to describe what he considers to be the two main types of moral societies: the contractual society and the beehive society.

The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.

The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media.

Haidt argues (correctly, in my opinion) that the contractual approach is favored by secular liberals while the beehive approach is advocated by cultural conservatives. He further claims that, speaking as a secular liberal himself, contractual societies offer the best paradigm for living peacefully in an increasingly pluralistic world.

It would have been nice if he would have stopped there; but then he goes on to join the fray surrounding the controversial and pejoratively named "New Atheists" with his final point:

I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it's impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society.

Haidt admits that the data from which the conclusions about the correlation between religiosity and charitable behavior (as well as enhanced personal health) are complex; but he additionally claims that one can't look to the New Atheists for ways to improve the overall wellbeing of society, or for a program to increase human flourishing, because the New Atheists are biased in their assessment of religion, religious societies, and religious believers.

Being an atheist myself (New, Old - whatever) - and having been raised in a Born-Again church and household - I would concede that my assessment of religion is biased; but it is biased because, for the better part of my life, I've thought critically about not only my religion but the idea of religion in general, and I've come to the conclusion that religion - at least fundamentalist religion - is not only absurd but potentially harmful both psychologically and societally.

But I actually agree with him to some extent; as I've argued before, I consider the term "atheism" to be merely the lack of belief in God or gods, but that the evidential basis for atheism is naturalism. The world-view known as naturalism can provide ways to improve human society and enhance human flourishing. Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism lays out the personal and social consequences of naturalism here.

But since some might (wrongly) identify the term 'naturalism' with a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest type of outlook, perhaps it's best to paraphrase Sartre and say that naturalism is a humanism, where humanism is defined as

a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

Technorati tags:

moral psychology, religion, naturalism, humanism, atheism

On the Relation Between Humanism and Naturalism

2007-09-15T05:39:00.003-05:00

I've been out of blogging mode lately, due partly to traveling for work and partly for personal reasons like my best friend's wedding. There has actually been a lot to blog about over the past few weeks, so I'd like to get started with an article that appeared in The Washington Post's "On Faith" section. The title of the article is "The Rabbi Who Believed in Good." I thought I would start with this article in light of the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, occurring this past week.

The article eulogizes Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, "the greatest American religious leader you never heard of" as they put it. He was the founder of the international movement of Humanistic Judaism, and had been called, whether pejoratively or not, "the atheist rabbi."

But perhaps I should say a word here about the term "Humanism." Humanism is a term that subsumes many different philosophies. But for the sake of simplicity, let's just say there are two main categories of Humanism: secular Humanism and religious Humanism. Now before you think the term religious Humanism is an oxymoron, you should know that a religious Humanist, while still considering herself an adherent of some type of religion, still believes in the dignity and worth of all human beings, and may even appeal to universal human qualities, such as rationality, in defending certain ethical stances.

Rabbi Wine viewed Judaism as a culture rather than a religion, and asserted that he could take pride in his culture while at the same time affirming the equality of all human beings as part of a Humanist world-view. I've known many such culturally Jewish people who practice the ceremonies and rituals in an effort to maintain that cultural identity, and based on my interactions with them, I would certainly call them Humanists, religious or otherwise.

In terms of the relation between Humanism and Naturalism, the world-view I espouse here in this blog, the article presents a reasonable summary of the similarity between Humanism and Naturalism as well as most naturalists' goal in promoting our world-view:

Yet the movement [Rabbi] Sherwin founded and the career he pioneered...was never against god but rather sought, beyond god, to create a humanist community, led by humanist professionals, for the benefit of all human beings....and now that best-selling books on atheism by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have shown millions what Humanists do not believe in, let those of us who happen to be freethinkers follow Sherwin's example and build a positive alternative to traditional religion. Let us build communities, organizations, and families that do good for ourselves and others, based on the Humanist ethic of reason, compassion and creativity.

The Center for Naturalism employs the mantra "Connection-Compassion-Control," to indicate the essence of naturalism as it applies to human lives:

Connection: Everything we are and do is completely connected to the rest of the world. Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us and surround us. Each of us is an unfolding, natural process, and every aspect of that process is caused, and is a cause itself. We are therefore entirely at home in the physical universe.

Compassion: Seeing that we are fully caused creatures - not self-caused - we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do. This leads to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We see that there but for circumstances go I. We would have been the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict, had we been given their genetic and environmental lot in life.

Control: Understanding how we are caused to behave as we do gives us increased powers of prediction and control. Instead of supposing people can simply will themselves to be otherwise, we concentrate our energies on creating the conditions which promote constructive personal and social change. The ethics of compassion is matched by a practical efficacy based in scientific knowledge.

While on the face of it one would think that Humanism and Naturalism are synonymous, I would argue that naturalism is the implicit philosophical basis for naturalism.

And whether Humanist or Naturalist, we seek to provide a positive, life-affirming alternative to faith-based religious world-views for which there is no compelling evidence, and which sometimes have far-reaching detrimental effects due in part to their ubiquity.

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Humanism, Naturalism

What is Atheism?

2007-09-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

British writer and philosopher Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction gives an excellent overview of the possibility of having meaning, purpose and morality without God or religion. An online summary of his chapter on "Atheist Ethics" can be found here. However, there is one clarification I would make to his excellent book.

Baggini defines atheism as "the belief that there is no God or gods." He goes on to say:

My aim in this book is to provide a positive case for atheism, one that is not simply about rubbishing religious belief.

But even though he goes on to provide distinctions between atheism, naturalism, and physicalism, he presents atheism as a positive belief system, which I think is misleading.

He describes physicalism as the claim that "the only things that exist are material objects." He admits this view of the world is rather crude, in the sense of lacking nuance, and that a more palatable definition would be that "only the objects of the physical sciences - physics, chemistry, and biology - exist. " He does eventually get to the real crux of the matter when he claims that many atheists' atheism is motivated by their conviction of the truth of naturalism, broadly taken to mean that there is only one, unified, natural world, and that there is no evidence for anything supernatural.

He further says that "atheism is essentially a form of naturalism and so its main evidential base is the evidence for naturalism." He then goes on to talk about the types of evidence: strong evidence, which is the kind that is generally observable and independently verifiable; and weak evidence, which is typically of the anecdotal kind.

But with all of the controversial press surrounding the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and the understandable (albeit mistaken) claims of 'atheist fundamentalism' or 'atheist dogmatism', I think it's much better to be clear about, and emphasize the importance of, atheism's link to naturalism.

I like to define atheism in its more etymological sense: a lack of belief in God or gods. That's all. It makes no positive claims; it expresses no beliefs. I call myself an atheist, but I always explain that my atheism is a result of my naturalism.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism, in his book Encountering Naturalism, describes naturalism this way:

In a nutshell, the naturalism I'll present holds that there is a single, natural, physical world in which we are completely included. There isn't a separate supernatural or immaterial realm and there's nothing supernatural or immaterial about us.

Naturalism takes science, and more broadly a rational, evidence-based empiricism, as the most reliable means for discovering what exists. If we stick with science, the world is united in our understanding, not divided into the natural versus the supernatural.

And as Baggini says in his book:

So the evidence for atheism is to be found in the fact that there is a plethora of evidence for the truth of naturalism and an absence of evidence for anything else. 'Anything else' of course includes God, but it also includes goblins, hobbits, and truly everlasting gobstoppers. There is nothing special about God in this sense. God just happens to be one of the things atheists don't believe in, it just happens to be the thing that, for historical reasons, gave them their name.

But here I just want to say a brief word about the straw man of what many pejoratively call Scientism - the belief that science can explain or know everything there is to explain or know about ourselves, our world and our universe, or that science is the final and only authority in matters extending beyond its scope: philosophy, ethics, religion, etc. The pejorative nature of the term arises from what many mistakenly perceive as the discipline of science's claims of 'proof.' Baggini addresses this in his book:

...absolute proofs are not available for the vast majority of our beliefs, but that a lack of such proof is no grounds for the suspension of belief. This is because where we have a lack of absolute proof we can still have overwhelming evidence or one explanation which is far superior to the alternatives.

Or to paraphrase arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion: what matters is not whether the existence of God is provable (it isn't), but whether or not the existence of God is probable. And this is where naturalists say that, based on the evidence our best disciplines of science provide us, the existence of God - or indeed anything supernatural - is highly improbable.

So while science can never definitively prove that there is no God - or anything supernatural - it has a lot to say about whether or not belief in God or the supernatural is justified. As a naturalist, naturally I say that belief in God or the supernatural is not justified. And that's why I prefer to present the evidence for naturalism with the hope that reasonable people will be persuaded by the preponderance of that evidence and the reliability of the scientific methodology from which that evidence is derived.

And that's why I think that knocking people over the head with the God-doesn't-exist hammer won't do much good.

Technorati tags:

atheism, naturalism, New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens

Have Scientists Found the Brain's Free Will Center?

2007-08-28T18:14:00.000-05:00

One of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' ancillary websites, healthfinder.gov, recently published an article on the latest neuroscience research titled, "Scientists Spot Brain's 'Free Will' Center." The article begins:

If you've ever been of "two minds" about doing something, a new study may explain why.

Scientists say one part of the brain is responsible for initiating action, while a totally separate area is in charge of not taking that action.

This newly identified region, involved in an aspect of self-control, may change conceptions of human free will, the researchers said. It could also explain the basis of impulsive as well as reluctant behavior, they added.

Given the recent spate of neuroscientific research that strongly suggests humans do not possess a capacity for contra-causal 'free will', no doubt some will find solace in the apparent conclusion at which this article arrives. Additionally, those of a more traditional monotheistic bent will seize upon this tidbit of research as evidence or justification for the necessity of their belief in free will. An essential tenet - possibly the central tenet - of monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam is that human possess the freedom to choose to obey God or not - or even to believe in God or not; and that this capacity for insubordination warrants an eternity of punishment. Tom Gilson of The Thinking Christian blog writes:

And it couldn't say [there's no such thing as free will]; not without jumping off to all kinds of unwarranted conclusions (of course, that didn't stop those other three newspapers from doing the same). The research said that there appear to be separate centers in the brain, one for planning and doing things, the other for deciding not to do them. One for action, one for inhibition. Somewhere, we make decisions. That somewhere remains scientifically unidentified. I predict it will remain that way.

Yes, the research purports to show that there is a center in the brain for initiating action and one for refraining from action. We know that different modules in the brain are responsible for different things. And, yes, we also know that somewhere in all that muddle decisions get made. The research can't say there's no free will; but, equally, it can't say there is. However, it (along with most other research in this area) strongly suggests that human beings do not possess contra-causal free will.

There's no doubt human beings make decisions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those are 'free' decisions. The most widely accepted, if inchoate or at least not fully thought out, view is that there is a little 'me' inside my brain who receives all the sensory information from my body and makes free decisions based on that information. This little 'me' is free to choose and decide in whatever way it pleases. But this concept cries out for an explanation of what makes the little 'me' in there decide the way it does? What determines how it chooses? There must be reasons for its choices, no? If there are no reasons, then its decisions would be completely arbitrary. Clearly our decisions do not seem arbitrary. We all claim to have reasons for our actions, for our decisions.

So what we end up with is a sort of Russian doll type of infinite regress: an infinite series of little 'me's' each providing the reasons for the previous 'me's' actions. At some point, in order for mini-me's actions to be free in the sense most of us generally, and religious believers in particular require, there must be a break in this chain, an insertion of a free element to the decision making process - a chink through which a god might slink, if you will. Because that's what we would have to be: each of us would have to be a Prime Mover, a first cause of ourselves. But does the idea of being a first cause of ourselves even make sense? I say no.

For me, and for those who call themselves naturalists, the debate over free will is, well, over. The more interesting part of the article relates to the consequences of being able to identify the area of the brain responsible for our inhibitory capacities. As the article states:

This study and others like it are really in their infancy, Miranda pointed out. That's important to remember, since the findings could one day have legal and other implications.

"This kind of data could have implications for legal definitions of 'diminished capacity,' " he explained. "There's a potential for informing legal definitions of mental illness and things like that."

"Much of our society is based on the concept of not only free will but also 'free won't,' the inhibition of response," Masur explained. "The difference between us as intelligent ordered social creatures and the society that would run amok is the ability to inhibit our responses, the ability to take control if a situation calls for it, to stop acting in a particular way . . . Maybe down the line somebody can develop a drug or hormone or transmitter system that targets that particular area of brain which strengthens the ability to negate responses which are too impulsive."

Aside from Masur's eerily Brave New World-ish suggestion, the implications for our criminal justice system could be significant. Our current criminal justice system is a retributivist one where we mete out 'just desserts' to those we deem are fully responsible (and not mentally compromised) for their actions. But a naturalistic understanding of ourselves says that we are fully natural, fully-caused creatures who aren't ultimately responsible for creating themselves, for good or ill.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism, in an email exchange with journalist Issac Bailey, draws out the implications of a naturalistic view of criminal justice which is relevant in light of this new research about 'free won't':

Bailey: People such as Stephen Stanko, who was convicted of murder and sexual assault, don't deserve the death penalty because they are a product of their environment and genetic makeup. I asked Clark: Why do you believe Stanko had no control over his actions?

Clark : Stanko had no control over his genetic endowment and his upbringing, the combination of which gradually created his character and propensities for criminal behavior. But I think it's incorrect to say Stanko had no control over what he did. After all, he wasn't completely insane. Had a police officer been present, he wouldn't have committed his crimes. Rather, it's that his capacity for conforming his conduct to the law - what we mean by self-control in this context - was severely compromised by various causal factors having to do with his genetics and upbringing. He lacked enough impulse control, plus had other dysfunctional, antisocial characteristics, for this horrific behavior to occur.

Bailey : I believe things such as genetics and the environment influence behavior but doesn't cause them, meaning it might be harder for someone like Stanko to resist the urge to commit violence but he can choose to resist nonetheless.

Clark : It's important to see that the extent of one’s capacity to resist violent urges can only be judged by one's actual behavior. It's not a matter of having this capacity and just choosing not to exercise it out of one's own uncaused free will. To say that it's harder for Stanko to exercise control is just to say that his capacity for control is severely compromised, compared to our (normal) capacity; so he behaved criminally, while we do not. All this could be fully explained if we knew enough about his genetics and life history. If you believe that “things such as genetics and the environment influence behavior but doesn't cause them,” then you believe, as do most people, that there is this third thing, this uncaused free will independent of genetics and environment, that does cause behavior. But then you have to explain where that will comes from, and why it chooses the way it does. If you can't answer those questions, you're appealing to a mystery, and if you do answer those questions, you'll see that it all ultimately boils down to environment and heredity as they create the person. There's nothing besides these that figure in causal explanations, according to science.

The significance of all this for the death penalty, of course, is that if you suppose Stanko has free will, and just chose not to refrain from killing, then he deserves to die since he's a self-made monster in some sense. But if we take the causal story of his character and behavior seriously, we can't suppose that he could have done otherwise.

Bailey : Given that view, what, exactly, should be done with the Stankos of the world, given the crimes they commit?

Clark: If, as I believe, we should be creating a less punitive, less dangerous society, then we want to reinforce nonviolent models of behavior and make inmates better, not worse. Right now, the death penalty and many prisons model the worst sort of behavior imaginable - killings, rape, isolation, degradation - and thus further damage inmates, many of whom will eventually be released, helping to perpetuate the sort of society that's causing crime in the first place. Once we drop the free-will-based, retributive justification for punishment, there are still valid objectives of criminal justice, including public safety, deterrence, rehabilitation, community restoration, and victim restitution.

Technorati tags:

free will, naturalism, criminal justice

What Does a Naturalist Believe? Part V

2007-08-22T07:52:00.001-05:00

In a time when the debate between religious believers and secular non-believers seems to be growing towards a fever pitch, I find myself drawn more and more to the task of expounding on the positive aspects of the world-view known as naturalism.

I call it a fever pitch because recent books penned by unabashed atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, have brought to the forefront of public discourse a heretofore taboo dialogue regarding the nature, aims and relevance of religious belief. Even CNN has been running a series ominously titled "God's Warriors". The series began last night with a look at so-called Jewish warriors; and over the next two nights they will be examining Christian warriors and Muslim warriors, respectively.

I watched last night's episode, and I should say that it does a good job of at least bringing to the public's attention the type of thinking that is behind the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; however, I think the show spent too much time on an Olympics-style "up close and personal" type of format. They delved more deeply into the specific circumstances of certain individuals and families, and not deeply enough into the underlying ideological and political beliefs driving the conflict. I imagine that the next two episodes will be more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a needful program, but I'm just indulging in a little Monday morning quarterbacking.

The criticism leveled at Dawkins, Harris, et. al., is that their approach is acerbic and divisive - and even somewhat evangelical, in its own way - and that ridiculing believers will only serve to strengthen their already impregnable redoubt of belief. I have leveled this same criticism; but I also believe that it is a necessary evil, so to speak. I think it's true that ridicule will almost never disabuse a true believer of her beliefs, however ridiculous those beliefs may be. But, at bottom, I consider the pejoratively-called New Atheists' effort to be a necessary opening salvo in exposing the nature, aims and relevance of religious belief in America. I believe it's been a long time coming, and if the implicit gag order regarding religious belief which has held sway over public discourse for so long has to be repealed through acerbic vitriol, then so be it.

Having outgrown a fundamentalist - though not particularly evangelical - church into a completely secular, naturalistic view of the world, I know how intellectually and emotionally arduous it can be to break free of a cultural and familial shibboleth such as religious belief - especially monotheistic belief with it's claim to absolute truth and the adherent's unqualified obedience.

My goal in this post is not to delineate the differences between religious faith and evidence-based empiricism and rationality (i.e., the endeavor of science). I intend to deal with the most salient and relevant issue facing someone who lacks belief in the supernatural: the most difficult thing to overcome, and the most persistent criticism leveled at non-believers, is the idea that existence is meaningless and empty without a belief in God.

In this regard, I'd like to use the 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as a sort of foil. I've always found Schopenhauer to be one of the more straightforward philosophers - which is unusual for 'professional' philosophers of his time, especially the German philosophers. Additionally, I am sympathetic to his affinity for the Upanishadic and Buddhist philosophies of India, which he rightly regarded as springing from a desire to understand and eradicate human suffering, despite their dubious metaphysical musings. Schopenhauer himself indulged in some specious metaphysical musings, especially in his work The World as Will and Representation. I think he had many things right, but there are some things, at least in my opinion as a metaphysical naturalist, that he had wrong.

But I want to focus on his thoughts about existence - human and otherwise. One of his essays was titled "The Emptiness of Existence"; and despite its seemingly nihilistic tone, it is difficult for a naturalist to argue with his most basic conclusions:

This emptiness finds its expression in the whole form of existence, in the infiniteness of Time and Space as opposed to the finiteness of the individual in both; in the flitting present as the only manner of real existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constantly Becoming without Being; in continually wishing without being satisfied; in an incessant thwarting of one’s efforts, which go to make up life, until victory is won. Time, and the transitoriness of all things, are merely the form under which the will to live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, has revealed to Time the futility of its efforts. Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.

Aside from his claim that the "will to live" is imperishable, his assessment is nearly identical to the Buddha's original diagnosis of human existence. When Schopenhauer talks about the Will as being the "thing-in-itself", he means to say that the Will is the ultimate reality, and that a human being is a temporary manifestation of this Will; but by doing so, he also imputes purpose or intention to it, something which we naturalists understand doesn't exist in nature as such: nature simply is, and it has no ultimate purpose. Humans have purposes, but that's not the same thing as saying that nature as a whole has a purpose.

But, as with the Buddha, he notes that existence is characterized by both incessant change and the automatic, ineradicable arising of innumerable desires. This is undoubtedly true. What we call the 'present moment' is so infinitesimally short - for example, as soon as a word is spoken, as soon as the sound waves enter our ear and are registered in the brain, it already belongs to the past. Sure, we remember words that have been spoken, and strings of words we call sentences, but they exist only in our memory - they no longer belong to this thing we call the present:

What has been exists no more; and exists just as little as that which has never been. But everything that exists has been in the next moment. Hence something belonging to the present, however unimportant it may be, is superior to something important belonging to the past; this is because the former is a reality and related to the latter as something is to nothing.

I like his idea that, from a human perspective, the present moment is 'superior' to something belonging to the past or to the future. Humanity, generally speaking, has always been concerned with living in the moment; carpe diem and all that. Indeed, it is the primary imperative of Zen Buddhism. We've all been admonished that dwelling on or bemoaning the past is a waste of time at best and downright unhealthy at worst; and that pining for an uncertain or indeterminate future is a similar misuse of valuable time. Our choices, our actions - the things that create our future - exist only in the present moment. By 'future', I mean the circumstances in which we eventually find ourselves, the way points along our lives - and not necessarily our personalities or characters; though clearly our choices and actions contribute to them.

So we naturalists learn not to harp on about the past, or to get caught up in the many machinations related to future concerns. Of course, this is easier said than done. For many, if not most, this is a Herculean task. Some may eventually succeed in this endeavor, while some may never get it. And of course most of us are everywhere along the spectrum. But naturalists don't worry about past 'sins' or the fate of their soul after death because naturalists don't believe in sin or souls or life after death. To a naturalist, these concepts don't refer to any reality.

As we delve further into the psyche of Schopenhauer, he begins to get more and more pessimistic:

In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change, where everything hurries on, flies, and is maintained in the balance by a continual advancing and moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual becoming and never Being is all that takes place. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. Then it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present and is now at an end.

Again, it is undoubtedly true that life is characterized by constant change, and that human beings continually strive for happiness; but it is disingenuous to say that no one is never happy. It's true that if all one is concerned with is superficial happiness - enjoying a good meal, having a good romp in the sack, a delicious piece of chocolate or a fine wine - then of course as soon as those desires are satisfied new ones arise and the wheel rolls on. And not everyone attains the same type of happiness, or finds happiness in the same objects or pursuits.

But can happiness be an abiding state of being, as opposed to a temporary state of mind? Here's where I think a religious believer and a secular non-believer cross paths. Both recognize that human beings can be characterized as fountains of desires; that this constant 'chasing after the wind' keeps one in a more or less continual state of agitation or perturbation; and that both seek to position themselves in relation to desires such that these desires lose their force. I would argue that they both aspire to be in the position Susan Blackmore describes:

The same is so for all desires. I want another helping of chocolate pudding. In fact there either will or won't be enough left for me. The desire will or won't be gratified. When it happens one way or the other I will go on paying attention either to the full tummy, yucky with chocolate or to the slightly emptier one with only one helping. Either way will be fine. The funny thing about paying attention is how everything really seems to be fine whether the desires are fulfilled or not.

Gradually this approach to desires transforms them. They don't go away but they stop driving you. It is as though, simply by paying attention, they lose their force. And you don't feel less alive but more so.

To most Westerners, this state of being seems almost impossible to attain. It is very Zen-like or Taoist in its approach. The goal is not to live without desire - that may very well be impossible - but to live in a right relation to one's desires such that one is not torn apart by them. Since it is impossible for human beings to quell the fountain from which desires spring, we must compose ourselves in such a way that we stand in an endurable relation to our desires.

The naturalist sees that all of existence - all human thought and activity, all of nature, from the subatomic to the cosmic - is in a state of flux. We understand that the satisfaction of simple desires leads to the craving for more and complicated desires, and that the course of one's life is largely determined by the nature of the desires one pursues - professionally, personally and spiritually.

There are many spiritual practices designed to accomplish this, from the simple yet difficult practice of Zen or the Taoist 'going with the flow', to more elaborate disciplines. Even the monotheistic religions essentially teach their adherents to channel their desires onto one object: God himself.

So while all naturalists share the common conviction that nature is all there is - there is nothing supernatural about existence - they employ different methods for achieving abiding happiness. Many attempt to lessen the force of desire, to be less driven by it; there may be some who capitulate and give themselves over to their desires, to be possessed by them; and there may be some who see this whole endeavor as pointless or impossible and try not to think about it too much.

But whatever their attitude toward desire, they understand and accept - though they might not be happy about - the fact that there is no recourse to any supernatural being or power or force in the universe to which they can appeal or entreat, and in the end they are thrown back on their own existence, their own resources, and must navigate their own way in the world.

But that is not a bad thing; and it is ultimately not all that different for the believer in the supernatural.

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naturalism, God's Warriors