Maverick Philosopher

The Essence of Religion

There is more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  They, however, are informed and guided by certain constitutive beliefs.  So the importance of the latter cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone.  It is not a mere form of life or language game.  It rests, pace Wittgenstein, on claims about the nature of reality, claims which, if false, render bogus the practices resting upon them.  In this post I present some characteristic beliefs/convictions that provide the scaffolding for what I take to be religion.  As scaffolding they are necessarily abstract so as to cover a variety of different religions.

Anything that does not fit this schema I am not inclined  to call a religion in any serious sense.  I may be willing to negotiate on (4) and (6).  (If Buddhism is a religion, it is a religion of self-help, at least in its purest forms.)

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

Jerry Coyne on Religion as Child Abuse

Coyne writes (emphasis added):

Dawkins has taken flak for characterizing religious indoctrination of children as “child abuse.”  Well, look at this picture and deny it.  [The picture depicts a young child holding a sign that reads: Behead all those who insult the Prophet.] True, it’s not the same as beating or sexually molesting one’s child, but the brain of this boy is being warped and twisted by vicious Muslim ideology.  What hope does he have when he grows up?

This also shows how crazy it is to characterize Islam as “the religion of peace.”

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.

This is pretty feeble stuff for someone who supposedly can think.  First of all, Coyne speaks of religious indoctrination and belief as such and in general, without qualification, making no distinctions among different religions or different beliefs within a given religion.  Suppose a child is made to memorize the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes.  That surely counts as religious indoctrination.  But is it child abuse?  Obviously not.

A second point is that Coyne and his New Atheist ilk  make no distinction between religious ideology and nonreligious ideology.  Radical Islam, if not Islam itself,  is a murderous religious ideology, and Coyne is quite right to protest its characterization as the "religion of peace."  But Nazism and godless communism are also murderous  ideologies whose doctrines justify mass murder.  According to the Black Book of Communism, communists murdered approximately 100 million people in the 20th century. 

Think of all the 'red diaper babies.'  I wonder if Coyne and his ilk would protest their indoctrination as child abuse.  If not, why not? Why is indoctrination in radical Islam worse than indoctrination in Naziism or communism?  Why the selective outrage?  If the genus extremist ideology is the problem, why attack only one of its species? 

I admit that there is something unseemly about criticizing a man like Coyne.  It's uncomfortably like rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. Nasty work, but somebody has to do it.  Here is further evidence of what a fool this man is.

But even worse than Coyne and Dawkins on the topic of religion as child abuse is the noxious A. C. Grayling.

We can be happy that the New Atheism has lost its mojo and is on the way out if not already dead.

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Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne, vol. II (Dover, 1966), p. 162. This is from Chapter XVII, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" (emphases added and a paragraph break):

Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical. The man of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meagre fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy-tales. If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality.

Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need for countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it . . . .

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

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Morality, Religion, Law

The positive law codifies moral judgments the chief vehicle of which is religion.  Attacks on religion therefore tend to undermine morality, and with it, the rule of law and respect for the rule of law.  Is this thesis supportable?

Religion could be kept private  and out of the public square.  Many think that it should be.  But law can't:  the whole point of law is to set forth prescriptions and proscriptions for the behavior of citizens, especially in their relations to one another. The suggestion that religion be relegated to the private sphere is not incoherent.  The suggestion that law be so relegated surely is.

Law, however, presupposes morality: the positive law is largely a codification of our moral judgments as to the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. We have laws against drunk driving, for example, because of our antecedent conviction that it is morally wrong to act in ways that needlessly endanger ourselves and others.  The legal rests on the moral: legal normativity is grounded in moral normativity.  If a law is genuinely normative, then it derives that normativity from a sound moral basis; otherwise the law is merely the say-so of legislators and not deserving of respect, though it might be something to fear.  But while the legal rests on the moral, it must not be conflated with it.  One proof of this is that laws can be morally evaluated.  Morally sane people have no trouble  pronouncing certain laws immoral.  One thinks of the Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich. It would be no defense of these laws to insist that they were legal and enacted according to all the relevant protocols of the judicial system then and there in effect.   'Illegal law' is a contradition in terms.  'Immoral law' is not.  The positive law is subject to moral evaluation.

Now the chief vehicle of morality for most people is and has been for centuries religion.  The Ten Commandments, for example, are to be found in the Old Testament, and are at the ethical center of both Judaism and Christianity.  There is much more to both religions than their respective ethical teachings, and there is much more to their ethical teachings than the Decalogue; but the latter is surely at the center of the ethical doctrine of  both religions.

Attacks on religion, therefore, are indirect attacks on the morality of which religion is the vehicle, as well as indirect attacks on the law that codifies the morality.  

Consider drunk driving again.  It is illegal.  And it ought to be: its legal impermissibility is morally defensible.  To mount  a moral defense of the law you have to argue from some moral principle or principles.  Ultimately you will be arguing from "Thou shalt not kill,"  one of the Ten Commandments.  Because we judge it immoral to  take innocent human life, we also judge it immoral (thought not as immoral) to recklessly endanger human life as drunk drivers do.

"But couldn't one keep the moral prohibitions against killing, stealing, lying, etc. as a basis of public policy while relegating the religious 'packaging' to the private sphere?"

There are two questions here.  The deeper one concerns the foundation of morality.  To put it graphically, can the normativity of Judeo-Christian ethics survive the death of God?  That may not be the best way to frame the question, but it conveys its flavor.  My present concern, however, is with a less deep question:  Does it make sense to attack the main means for the majority of people to acquire moral formation and guidance?

You know what my answer is.

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The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

This from R. J. Stove, son of atheist and neo-positivist, David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my  mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

 

 

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis:  Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.  I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' -- which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable -- I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative.  ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was."  Why are these the only two alternatives?  The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church.  One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East.  After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church.  That is at least a possibility.  If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be.  It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant  truth.  It might even be that it is impossible that any church be the true church and final repository of all religous truth.

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an   worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice. That is not so say his choice was not a good one.  Better a Catholic than  a benighted positivist like his father.

My point is a purely logical one: his alternative is a false alternative. I am not taking sides in any theological controversy.  Not in this post anyway.

Animal Sacrifice

I recently presented an alternative to the conceit shared by both atheists and immature religionists that religion is static, a closed system of doctrines and practices insusceptible of development and correction and refinement. The following is a bit of evidence for the alternative.

The ancients sacrificed animals outside them on the altar of divine worship.  Progress was made when more spiritually advanced individuals realized that it is the animal in them that needs sacrificing. Slaughtering a prized animal such as a lamb and offering it up is crude and external and superstitious.  What needs to be offered up is our base nature which is grounded in our animality but is a perversion of it.

But what if God commands Abraham to sacrifice that animal outside him that is is own son Isaac?  Abraham should conclude that it cannot be God who is so commanding him.  I argue this out in detail in Abraham, Isaac, and an Aspect of the Problem of Revelation and in Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

Addendum (1/7/13):  S.N. was reminded of this quotation fromPorphyry, De Abstinentia II, 61:

θεοῖς δὲ ἀρίστη μὲν καταρχή· νοῦς καθαρὸς καὶ ψυχὴ ἀπαθής

The best offering to the gods indeed is this: a pure mind and a soul free from passions.

That is my meaning exactly.

 

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Religion Always Buries its Undertakers

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over a year now.  He will  be joined by Dennett and Dawkins, Grayling and Harris, and the rest of the militant atheists. 

Religion, like philosophy, always buries its undertakers.

It was Etienne Gilson who famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

I continue the thought in Philosophy Always Resurrects its Dead.

Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too: More Quest Than Conclusions

The following is from an interview with A. C. Grayling who is speaking of the open mind and open inquiry:

It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that humankind has with itself about all these things that really matter.”

It’s also a way of thinking that marks a line in the sand between religion and science. The temptation to fall for the former—hook, line, and sinker—is plain to see: “People like narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where they are going.” Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow human beings “don’t want to have to think these things out for themselves. They like the nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody authoritative with a big beard.”

A. C. Grayling, like many if not most militant atheists, sees the difference between religion and science in the difference between pre-packaged dogmas thoughtlessly and uncritically accepted from some authority and open-ended free inquiry.

That is not the way I see it.  For me, mature religion is more quest than conclusions.  It too is open-ended and ongoing, subject to revision and correction. It benefits from abrasion with such competing sectors of culture as philosophy and science.  By abrasion the pearl is formed.

All genuine religion involves a quest since God must remain largely unknown, and this by his very nature. He must remain latens Deitas in Aquinas' phrase:

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

(tr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, here.)
 

But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less  of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive becomes ossified.  All human institutions are corruptible, and are eventually corrupted.

Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing  of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. When philosophy and religion and mysticism and science are viewed as quests they complement one another. And this despite the tensions among Athens, Jerusalem, Benares, and Alexandria.

The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist -- he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil -- to mention one line of attack.  What he 'knows,' of course, is only the concept he himself has fabricated and projected.  Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature -- which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.

The (immature) religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder -- or worse.

How is it that someone as intelligent as Grayling could have such a cartoonish understanding of religion?  The answer is that he and his brethren  utterly lack the religious sensibility.  They lack it in the same way many scientists lack the philosophical sensibility, many prosaic folk the poetic sensibility, and so on.

This is why debates with militant atheists are a waste of time.  To get a taste of the febrile militancy of Grayling's atheism, see here. 

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Eben Alexander: "We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains"

I am at the moment listening to Dennis Prager interview Dr. Eben Alexander. Prager asked him whether he now maintains, after his paranormal experiences, that consciousness is independent of the brain.  Alexander made a striking reply: "We are conscious in spite of our brains."  And then he made some remarks to the effect that the brain is a "reducing filter" or something like that.

That is to say much more than that consciousness can exist independently of the brain.  For the latter would be true if consciousness existed in an attenuated form after the dissolution of the body and brain. Alexander is saying that embodiment severely limits our awareness.

Well, why couldn't that be true? Why is it less plausible than a form of materialism that views consciousness as somehow dependent on brain functioning and impossible without it?

Let us assume you are not a dogmatist: you don't uncritically adhere to the unprovable materialist framework assumption according to which consciousness just has to be brain-based.  And let us assume that you don't have a quasi-religious faith that future science has wonderful revelations in store that will vindicate materialism/physicalism once and for all.   By the way, I have always found it passing strange that people would "pin their hopes on future science."  You mean to tell me that you hope you can be shown to be nothing more than a complex physical system slated for utter extinction!?  That's what you hope for?  It may in the end be true, but I for one cannot relate to the mentality of someone who would hope for such a thing.  "I hope I am just a bag of chemicals to be punctured in a few years.  Wouldn't it be awful if I had an higher destiny and that life actually had a meaning?"

But I digress.  Let's assume you are not a dogmatist and not a quasi-religious believer in future science.  Let's assume you are an open-minded inquirer like me.  You are skeptical in the best sense: inquisitive but critical.  Then I put the question to you: Can you show that the Alexander claim is less plausible that the materialist one?

I don't believe that there can be talk of proof either way, assuming you use 'proof' strictly.  You have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.  In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the mortalist and that of his opposite number.

So I advance to the consideration that for me clinches the matter.  Bring the theoretical question back down to your Existenz.  How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days?  Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke?  Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake?  It is your life.  You decide.

Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing.  Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life.  What will they have lost by believing as they did?

Nothing! Nothing at all.  You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion.  But no one will ever know one way or the other.  And if the body's death is the last word then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.

If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere. 

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Ego, Sin, and Logic

Ego is at the root of sin, but also at the root of obsessive preoccupation with one's sinfulness. If the goal is to weaken the ego, then too much fretting over one's sins in the manner of a Wittgenstein is contraindicated.

There is such a thing as excessive moral scrupulosity.

Though Wittgenstein's ego drove him to scruple inordinately, he was a better man than Russell.  Russell worried about logic.  Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

Bill O'Reilly: Christianity not a Religion, but a Philosophy

Bill O'Reilly does a lot of  good, but he made a fool of himself last night on his O'Reilly Factor.  It was painful to watch. In the course of a heated exchange with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O'Reilly claimed that Christianity is not a religion, but a philosophy.  At first I thought I had misheard, but Mr. Bill repeated the ridiculous assertion.

And yet O'Reilly was right to oppose the extremism of Silverman and the zealots who seek to remove every vestige of religion from the public square, though they seem to be rather less zealous when it comes to the 'religion of peace.'

It is not enough to have the right view; one must know how to defend it properly.  A bad argument for a true conclusion gives the impression that there are no good arguments for it.  And this is where conservatives tend to fall short.  See my Anti-Intellectualism on the Right and Why Are Conservatives Inarticulate?

O'Reilly's bizarre assertion shows that he has no understanding of the differences among philosophy, religion, and Christianity.  For part of my views on the differences between philosophy and religion, see here.  There is room for disagreement on the exact definition of 'religion,'  but if anything is clear, it is that Christianity is a religion.  O'Reilly only dug his hole deeper when he claimed that while Christianity is a philosophy, Methodism is a religion!

I am reminded of the inarticulate George W. Bush.  He once claimed that Jesus was his favorite philosopher.  That silly assertion showed that Bush understood neither philosophy nor Jesus.  Jesus claimed not only to know the truth, but to be  the truth.  "I am the way, the truth, and the life . . . ."  That is  a claim that no philosopher qua philosopher can make.  A philosopher is a mere seeker of truth, not a possessor of it, let alone truth's very incarnation.  A philosopher is a person who is ignorant, knows that he is, and seeks to remedy his deficiency.

Neither God nor Christ are philosophers.  And we can thank God for that!

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A Non-Coercive Attempt to Dissuade Me From Religious Belief

MavPhil Cairo correspondent, Spencer C. writes,

I've continued to think on one of our old disagreements, the one about religion and zealotry, and I'd like to continue the discussion. Previously, I'd put forward the argument attempting to show that religious belief is rationally unacceptable. Now, I'm thinking it might be profitable to repackage the argument for a more modest conclusion. I want to say something like, "Given other epistemic commitments that I have and, on reflection, find myself unable to give up, I find that I am rationally unable to accept religious belief of the sort in question." Since I take these commitments to be closely related to the conservative disposition which you and I share, perhaps you will find that you, too are committed to abandoning religious belief." This is, to use a phrase from Robert Nozick, non-coercive philosophy, and I am growing increasingly inclined to think that herein all real persuasion lies.

BV:  I suggest we divide persuasion into nonrational and rational, and then subdivide rational persuasion into coercive and noncoercive.   Noncoercive rational persuasion, I take it, would be rational persuasion that makes use only of propositions  already  accepted by the person to be persuaded in an attempt to get him to accept a proposition to which he is logically committed by what he already accepts but does not yet accept.  I agree that in the vast majority of cases only noncoercive rational persuasion has a chance at success.

Let me now re-frame the argument that I have presented earlier, with the hope that I can improve on my earlier formulations. When I was a soldier in Afghanistan, I attended a ceremony for a fallen comrade. Nobody I knew. In main sermon, the chaplain said, "Sgt. So-and-so got a big promotion that day," referring to the day an IED [improvised explosive device] ended the life of this unfortunate soldier. His reasoning is that now this soldier was enjoying the loving embrace of Jesus. Whatever suffering this caused him or his family is comparatively small.

I found the chaplain's speech off-putting because his account robbed this soldier's death of its tragedy. He went well beyond consoling the survivors to telling us that we should be positively happy that this event occurred. What disturbed me more, though, is that the chaplain arrived at this conclusion very reasonably from very widely held set of religious beliefs. If one believes, as a majority of the people of the world do, that an eternity of happiness of a much higher grade than any that exists on earth awaits the righteous after death, then one is left to draw this, and other unpalatable conclusions. For instance, if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to
religion, then it would seem one should do it.

I too am put off by the chaplain's speech but for a different reason.  What I find offensive is his presumption to know that the unfortunate soldier is now in a far better state.  No one can legitimately claim to know that God exists, or that we survive our bodily deaths as individuals, or that Jesus is the son of God, or that  a given person is in heaven as opposed to the other place, etc.  (Nor can one legitimately claim to know the negations of any of these propositions.)  People can and do believe these things, and some have good reasons for (some of) their beliefs.  Since no one can know about these things, the chaplain had no right to offer the kind of ringing assurance he offered or to make the claim that one should be positively happy that the soldier was blown to bits.

So I would say that the chaplain was doubly presumptuous.  He presumed to know what no one can know, and he presumed to make a comforting assurance that he was not entitled to make.  But had he said something tentative and in keeping with our actual doxastic predicament, then I wouldn't have been offended.  Suppose he had said this:  "Our faith teaches us that death is not the end and that this life is but a prelude to a better  life to come.  We hope and pray that Sgt So-and-So is now sharing in that higher life."  I would not be put off by such a speech.  Consolation without presumption.

What you are offended by is something different, the very content of the Christian message.  But suppose it is true.  Then there is nothing ultimately "tragic" about the soldier's death.  (I also think you are misusing 'tragic.'  Was hubris displayed by the soldier prior to his death?)  He has left this vale of tears and has gone to a better 'place.'  You see, if Christianity is true, then death does not have the 'sting' that it has for an atheist (assuming the atheist values life in this world).  Are you then just assuming that Christianity is false?  If it is false, then Nietzsche is right and it is a slander upon this life, the only life there is.  But is it false?  You can't just assume that it is. 

Distinguish the question whether Christianity is true from the question whether it can be known to be true (by anyone here below).  I claim that it cannot be known to be true, using 'know' in a strict and intellectually responsible way. 

Now one of the "unpalatable consequences" you mention is this: "if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it."  But this is not a consequence of Christian belief, but at best a consequence of the fanatical and dogmatic belief that one knows  that Christianity is true.  Suppose I did know that Christianity -- or rather some fire-and- brimstone variant of Christianity-- is true, then why wouldn't I be justified in torturing someone until he accepts the saving truth, the truth without which he will spend all eternity in hell?  What's worse, a day of torture or an eternity of it?  Besides, if I really care about you, wouldn't I want you to have an eternity of bliss?

What you are giving us, I think, is an argument against religious fanaticism, not an argument against religion.  Religion is a matter of faith, not knowledge.  More precisely, genuine religion is a matter of a faith that understands that it is faith and not knowledge.  Once that is understood your "unpalatable consequences" do not ensue.  For if I understand that my faith transcends what I can legitimately claim to know, then this understanding will prevent me from torturing someone into acceptance of my creed.  For surely it is clearer that one ought not torture people into the acceptance of metaphysical propositions than that said propositions are true.

Now, as our previous discussions have shown, one is not compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook, as I have done, because of these considerations. One is only compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook if one also accepts the idea that earthly goods are not negligible in terms of the reasons they provide. To be clear, I mean things like: the pleasures of laughter, friendship, sex, families, etc., as well as achieving important life goals (including the goal of living a philosophical life in a tumultuous world.) I accept that these things are non-negligible and I feel confident that any theory of the Good Life must afford them a central place. I don't think I can provide a further justification for why I believe this, other than I find the thought compelling. If an interlocutor is happy to accept that these are all axiological ciphers because they are nothing when compared with the goodness of God in the next world, then I must part ways with him.  I would, however, be surprised for a conservative to take that view, since conservatives, more than progressives, tend to value the familiar.

I am not sure I follow this last paragraph, but I take you to be saying that there are certain non-negligible goods that this life provides (friendship, etc.) and that anyone who accepts that there are must adopt a non-religious outlook.  Your argument can perhaps be put as follows:

1. If a religion such as Christianity is true, then the good things of this world are relatively unimportant as compared with the good things of the world to come.

2.  But it is not the case that the good things of this world are relatively unimportant: they are absolutely important.

Therefore

3. Someone of conservative bent, someone who is capable of appreciating what actually and presently exists, ought to reject a religion such as Christianity.

I would respond to this by saying that the goods of this world are certainly not absolutely important, but they are not "axiological ciphers" either.  A theist will say that what exists in this world is good because it comes from the source of all goodness, God.  So the conservative theist has plenty of reason to appreciate what actually and presently exists, but he is also in a position to evaluate the goodness of finite goods properly and without idolatry because he appreciates that they are other than that which is wholly good.  The goods of this world are neither negligible nor absolute, neither illusory nor absolutely real.

I would further argue that atheists typically succumb to axiological illusion: they take what is relatively valuable for absolutely valuable.

Related articles

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

Theism on Secular Grounds

A reader inquires:

Can one reason from secular premises to a theistic conclusion? Or is any argument that concludes to God's existence non-secular by nature?

The reader liked yesterday's abortion post in which I used non-religious (and in that sense secular) premises to support a conclusion which, though not religious, would be accepted by most religionists and rejected by most secularists.

To answer the reader's question, yes, one can reason from secular premises to a theistic conclusion.  Indeed, the traditional arguments do precisely that.  For example, cosmological arguments proceed a contingentia mundi, from the contingency of the world, and they attempt to show that there must be a necessary being responsible for the world's existence.  That the universe exists and that it exists contingently are secular starting points  -- in one of its meanings saecula just means 'world' -- and not deliverances of revelation or churchly doctrines to be taken on faith. 

Now the same goes for the rest of the theistic arguments, the ontological, the teleological, the moral, and indeed for all of the twenty or so arguments that Plantinga lists.

The reader has a second question.  Can a person sincerely  pray in a secular way?  Suppose a person comes to believe by some combination of the arguments mentioned that there must be a being, external to the universe, on which it depends for its existence and nature.  Suppose the person prays to this God.  Is the person engaged in a secular act?

No. Prayer is a specifically religious act.  The theistic arguments operate on the discursive plane to satisfy a theoretical need.  Indeed they are often denigrated on the ground that the God they prove is a mere 'God of the philosophers' and not 'the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'  Even the great Pascal makes this mistake.  See Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers. 

There can't be two or more gods, but there can be two or more ways of approaching one and the same God.  I count four: philosophy (reason), religion (faith), mysticism (intellectual intuition), and morality (conscience).

To sum up.  From secular starting points one can reason to something 'out of this world.'  But to come into relation with this Something requires religious and mystical and moral practices that cannot be called secular. 

What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?

The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion.  The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example.  The moderator  introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I  would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your  own personal views on abortion.”  Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion?   Why did she bring up religion?  And why the phrase "personal views"?  Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views?  Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square. 

A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post:  What does the abortion issue have to do with religion?  But I need to make the question more precise.  Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument. 

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme  Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban  Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama -- in the Illinois Senate -- also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

Return to the above argument.  Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide -- general in the sense that it admits of exceptions -- comes from the Ten Commandments.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is The Woman's Body Argument:

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

 If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I wrote "perhaps (2) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (2) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (2) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems.  And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden.

Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations.  If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer:

A test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study brain activity while the subject is deep in prayer/meditation.  The red in the language center and frontal lobe areas indicates greater brain activity when the subject is praying or meditating as compared to the baseline when he is not.  But when atheists "contemplate God" -- which presumably means when they think about the concept of God, a concept that they, as atheists, consider to be uninstantiated -- "Dr. Newberg did not observe any of the brain activity in the frontal lobe that he observed in religious people."

The upshot?

Dr. Newberg concludes that all religions create neurological experiences, and while God is unimaginable for atheists, for religious people, God is as real as the physical world. "So it helps us to understand that at least when they [religious people] are describing it to us, they are really having this kind of experience... This experience is at least neurologically real."

First of all, why do we need a complicated and expensive study to learn this?  It is well-known that serious and sincere practioners of religions will typically have various experiences as a result of prayer and meditation.  (Of course most prayer and meditation time is 'dry' -- but experiences eventually come.)  The reality of these experiences as experiences cannot be doubted from the first-person point of view of the person who has them.  There is no need to find a neural correlate in the brain to establish the reality of the experience qua experience.  The experiences are real whether or not neural correlates can be isolated, and indeed whether or not there are any. 

Suppose no difference in brain activity is found as between the religionists and the atheists when the  former do their thing and the latter merely think about the God concept.  (To call the latter "contemplating God" is an absurd misuse of terminology.)  What would that show? Would it show that there is no difference between the religionists' experiences and the atheists'?  Of course not.  The difference is phenomenologically manifest, and, as I said, there is no need to establish the "neurological reality" of the experiences to show that they really occur.

Now I list some possible confusions into which one might fall when discussing a topic like this.

Confusion #1: Conflating the phenomenological reality of a religious experience as experienced with its so-called "neurological reality."  They are obviously different as I've already explained.

Confusion #2: Conflating the  religious experience with its neural correlate, the process in the brain or CNS on which the experience causally depends.  Epistemically, they cannot be the same since they are known in different ways.  The experience qua experience is known with certainty from the first-person point of view.  The neural correlate is not.  One cannot experience, from the first-person point of view, one's own brain states as brain states.  Ontically, they cannot be the same either, and this for two sorts of reasons.  First, the qualitative features of the experiences cannot be denied, but they also cannot be identified with anything physical.  This is the qualia problem.  Second, religious/mystical experiences typically exhibit that of-ness or aboutness, that directedness-to-an-object, that philosophers call intentionality.  No physical states have this property.

Confusion #3:  Conflating a religious entity with its concept, e.g., confusing God with the concept of God.  This is why it is slovenly and confused to speak of "contemplating God"  when one is merely thinking about the concept of God.  The journalist and/or the neuroscientist seem to be succumbing to this confusion.

Confusion #4:  Conflating an experience (an episode or act of experiencing) with its intentional object.  Suppose one feels the presence of God.  Then the object is God.  But God is not identical to the experience.  For one thing, numerically different experiences can be of the same object. The object is distinct from the act, and the act from the object.  The holds even if the intentional object does not exist.  Suppose St Theresa has an experience of the third person of the Trinity, but there is no such person.  That doesn't affect the act-object structure of the experience.  After all, the act does not lose its intentional directedness because the object does not exist.

Confusion #5:  Conflating the question whether an experience 'takes an object' with the question whether the object exists.

Confusion #6:  Conflating reality with reality-for.  There is no harm is saying that God is real for theists, but not real for atheists if all one means is that theists believe that God is real while atheists do not.  Now if one believes that p, it does not follow that p is true.  Likewise,  if God is real for a person it doesn't follow that God is real, period.  One falls into confusion if one thinks that the reality of God for a person shows that God is real, period.

We find this confusion at the end of the video clip. "And if God only exists in our brains, that does not mean that God is not real.  Our brains are where reality crystallizes for us."

This is confused nonsense.  First of all God cannot exist in our brains.  Could the creator of the universe be inside my skull?  Second, it would also be nonsense to say that the experience of God is in our brains for the reasons give in #2 above.  Third, if "God exists only in our brains" means that the experience of God is phenomenologically real for those who have it, but that the intentional object of this experience does not exist, then it DOES mean that God is not real.

Confusion #7:  Conflating the real with the imaginable.  We are told that "God is unimaginable for atheists."  But that is true of theists as well: God, as a purely spiritual being, can be conceived but not imagined.  To say that God is not real is not to say that God is unimaginable, and to say that something (a flying horse, e.g.) is imaginable is not to say that it is real.

What I am objecting to is not neuroscience, which is a wonderful subject worth pursuing to the hilt.  What I am objecting is scientism, in the present case neuroscientism, the silly notion that learning more and more about a hunk of meat is going to give us real insight into the mind and is operations and is going to solve the philosophical problems in the vicinity.

What did we learn from the article cited?  Nothing.  We don't need complicated empirical studies to know that religious experiences are real.  What the article does is sow seeds of confusion.  One of the confusions the article sows is that the question of the veridicality of religious experiences can be settled by showing their "neurological reality."  Neither the phenomenological nor the neurological reality of the experience qua experience entails  the reality of the object of the experience.

Genuine science cannot rest on conceptual foundations that are thoroughly confused.

Realms of Experience Beyond the Natural

This from a reader:

I was reading your post on Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It and was struck by a statement you made at the end regarding "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences."  By this you seem to confirm a developing series of thoughts I have had for a few years.  As a benefit of my modernist education my categories of thought roughly corresponded to natural and supernatural.  It seems to me that this type of thinking is wrong and there have been a lot of things crammed into the "supernatural" category by moderns just because they are not "natural."  It would be interesting to see how you break these things out and why they are different.  Specifically as someone who has the religious inclination.

The reader is right: a lot of rather different things have been lumped together under the rubric 'supernatural' just because they are beyond the natural.  But distinctions need to be made.  Now this is a huge topic, and I am not up to doing it justice. 

Corresponding to the phrase the reader quoted, "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences,"  I will say a little about mysticism, religion, and occultism.  Some of this is excerpted from a much longer post that discusses the relations among philosophy, mysticism, religion, and wisdom.

Mysticism 

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone
his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs.  The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition.

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative.  The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth.  If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an
idol.

The Difference Between Mysticism and Religion

Roughly, mysticism is monistic while religion is dualistic, presupposing the ineliminability of  what Martin Buber calls the 'I-Thou relation.' Here is a passage from his I and Thou:

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself -- the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including
Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude
that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation
internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter -- wholly successful only now -- with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives -- and the man
who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality
that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether
accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a
worldly religion, a religion for this life -- which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now,
and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

Occultism

Stay away from this stuff!  Everything reputable that I have read warns against it. The occult region is a sort of borderland between the natural and the properly supernatural which is the sphere of religion and mysticism.  One who meditates deeply and long enough will probably encounter 'items' from this region such as photisms and unearthly voices.  Certain paranormal powers may be released, the siddhis of the Hindus, such as pre-cognition. Don't get hung up on this and maintain a skeptical attitude. What's real will be able to withstand skepsis & scrutiny.  If you are trying to plumb the depths of the self, these are just more objects of consciousness, not consciousness itself in its innermost essence.  Hearing a sound, or seeing a light, inquire: who hears this sound, who sees this light?  Who is the subject for whom these strange appearances are objects?  That being said, photisms and such are signs that you are attaining meditative depth.  There may also be, for all you know, Horatio, angels and demons and disembodied souls hanging around  in this border region, and some of these 'entities' you don't want to mess with.  Some of them are stronger than you are.  So you might begin your session on the black mat by asking for the assistance of any guardians you think there might be. 

In any case, meditation is not a hunt for weird experiences or for paranormal powers.  The pursuit of the latter is a corruption of meditation just as crass petitionary prayer is a corruption of genuine prayer.  Grades of Prayer fills this out a bit. 

No Religion? Then No Solution

"Imagine no religion," John Lennon sang.  Suppose we could take it a step beyond imagination and make religion disappear.  Would we thereby eliminate the problems to which religion is supposed to be the solution? Of course not.  Suppose we destroyed all the hospitals, old folks' homes, and mortuaries.  Would we thereby remove from the world sickness, old age, and death?  That trio of woes that put young Prince Siddartha on the path to Buddhahood?  No, we would merely have gotten rid of certain ways of dealing with them. 

Religion deals with real problems.

The problems cannot be solved by any other means.

Better the admittedly questionable solutions religion offers than no solutions at all. 

Those who denigrate religion but cannot put anything better in its place do a disservice to humanity.

Suppose religion is utterly devoid of truth in all of its central claims:  there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem rewards or punishments, no moral world order, no final justice, no meaning beyond what we can create for ourselves, which meaning, arguably, is a pseudo-meaning, no higher destiny, no salvation. 

Then there is No Exit, to cop a phrase from a certain French existentialist.

What is Religion? How Does it Differ from Superstition?

There is more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  They, however, are informed and guided by certain constitutive beliefs.  So the importance of the latter cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone.  It is not a mere form of life or language game.  It rests, pace Wittgenstein, on claims about the nature of reality, claims which, if false, render bogus the practices resting upon them.  In this post I present some characteristic beliefs/convictions that provide the scaffolding for what I take to be religion.  As scaffolding they are necessarily abstract so as to cover a variety of different religions.

Anything that does not fit this schema I am not inclined  to call a religion in any serious sense.  I may be willing to negotiate on (4) and (6).  (If Buddhism is a religion, it is a religion of self-help, at least in its purest forms.)

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

Superstition as degenerate religion will involve a perversion of these beliefs/convictions.

Ad (1). Superstition can arise when the attempt is made to populate the unseen order with anthropomorphic beings  or idols from the sense world or from the world of abstract thought.  Superstition also arises when one presumes to an exact knowledge of this order and its 'economy.'  For example, the sale or indeed even the granbting of indulgences is superstitious since based on a presumption to know the precise mechanics and economy of salvation, the exact nature and quantities of post-mortem rewards and punishments in  heaven and hell and purgatory. 

Ad(2). Superstition can arise if the supreme good is misinterpreted as a material or quasi-material good, or as something ego-enhancing or ego-serving.  True religion doe snot feed the ego but mortify it.

Ad (3), (4), (5).  These points are ignored or downplayed by the superstitious/idolatrous.

Ad (6). Superstitious is the belief that material and ego-serving help can be had via relics, medals, etc. 

Ad (7). Superstitious is the belief that the unseen order is a world behind the scenes, a hinterworld, a quasi-sensible world very much like this one but with the negative removed.  The crassest such conceptuion is the Islamic one of the 72 black-eyed virgins in which one engages endlessly in the carnal delights forbidden here.

Whether Atheism is a Religion

Yesterday I objected to calling leftism a religion.  Curiously, some people call atheism a religion.  I object to that too.

The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer.  It is not even clear that the question makes sense.  For when you ask 'What is religion?' you presuppose that it has an essence that can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions.  But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example).  Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have?  Presumably not.  The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds.  Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.

If you take this tack, then you can perhaps argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.

But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize  a militant anti-religionist as having a religion.  Indeed,
it smacks of a cheap debating trick:  "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" I prefer to think along the following lines.

Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications,  and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action.  Call the latter ideologies.  Accordingly, an ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies.  Marxism and militant atheism are non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are
religious ideologies.

But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies.  Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, being only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self.  I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking.  I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of higher psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieving equanimity.

There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.

But as I pointed out yesterday, if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.

Leftism: The World's Most Dynamic Religion?

Dennis Prager answers in the affirmative:

For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.

It has been leftism.

Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

While I agree with the rest of Prager's column, I have trouble with his characterization of leftism as a religion. 

It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects.  But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is a species of the other. Whales are like fish in certain key respects, but a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Whales live in the ocean, can stay underwater for long periods of time and have strong tails to propel themselves. Just like fish.  But whales are not fish.

I should think that correct taxonomies in the realm of ideas are just as important as correct taxonomies in the realm of flora and fauna.

Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. This is the truth to which Prager alludes with his sloppy formulation, "leftism is a religion."  Leftism in theory is opposed to every religion as to an opiate of the masses, to employ the figure of Karl Marx.  In practice, however, today's leftists are rather strangely soft on the representatives of the 'religion of peace.'

Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. 'Ersatz' here functions as an alienans adjective. It functions  like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.'  A decoy duck is not a duck.  A substitute for religion is not a religion.

An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  That genus divides into the species religious ideologies and nonreligious ideologies.  Leftism, being "overwhelmingly secular" just as Prager says, is a nonreligious ideology. It is not a religion, but it shares some characteristics with religions and functions for its adherents as a substitute for religion.

You might think to accuse me of pedantry.  What does it matter that Prager sometimes employs sloppy formulations? Surely it is more important that leftism be defeated than that it be fitted into an optimal taxonomy!

Well yes, slaying the dragon is Job One.  But we also need to persuade intelligent and discriminating people.  Precision in thought and speech is conducive to that end.  And that is why I say, once more:  Language matters!

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

This from an English reader:

As you may recall, I'm a persistent reader of your blog - even when the 'topic of the day' goes right over my head.

On the minimalist version of Pascal's wager, you summarize: "So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."

I've mulled over this rational incentive to believe in God many and many a time. But belief doesn't come. If faith is a 'gift from God' or depends on the possession of a religious disposition, then for some unfathomable reason I've missed out. I guess there are many people like myself who are 'trying to believe' but don't and perhaps never will succeed. (And it's not from the want of pressure and sometimes disinterested tuition, when I was a lad, from my Jesuit teachers.)

I think the sorts of pragmatic considerations I adduced the other day  in support of the rationality of religious belief will leave unmoved someone lacking the religious disposition.  (I'll leave aside the question whether the religious disposition is a divine gift.) Without the disposition the issue cannot be a "live option"  in William James' sense.  You have to be antecedently inclined to take seriously the possibility that some form of religion is true.  This has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge or upbringing.  Not intelligence: there are both intelligent and unintelligent theists and atheists.  Not knowledge: there is no empirical knowledge that rules out theism or rules in atheism.  Not upbringing: some are raised atheists and becomes theists, and vice versa.  What you need is a certain sort of spiritual depth that is present in, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but absent in, say, Daniel Dennett.  If you are 'surface all the way down' religion won't get a grip on you.

In the reader's case religious belief seems to be a live option in the way in which it is not for most atheists.  (For most atheists, and for all of the militant atheists, the truth of some religion is no more a live existential option than numerology or Marxism is for me.)  But for the reader, apparently, the disposition is not enough.  I wish I could help him.

Let me just state what, in my own case, are the additional factors, factors beyond the religious disposition, that move me to accept religious belief. 

1. The Manifold Failures of Naturalism.  There are four questions that need answering. 

The first is why there is anything (or at least anything concrete and contingent) at all.  This is an intelligible question but there is no good naturalist answer to it.   The physicist Lawrence Krauss recently made a fool of himself over this question as I demonstrated in earlier posts.  The second question is how life arose from inanimate matter.  Life has to have arisen before natural selection can go to work upon random mutations.  The third is how consciousness arose in some living organisms, and the fourth is how self-consciousness, conscience, reason and all related phenomena arose.  There are many, many questions here, but it is widely accepted that naturalism has failed to give adequate answers to them.  Naturalists give answers all right, but they are no good. For the gory details, see my Naturalism category.

Now of course nothing I said will convince any naturalist, but that's not my purpose.  My purpose is to explain how one can reasonably take religion seriously.  I could not take it seriously if naturalism were true. The refutation of naturalism therefore removes an obstacle to religious belief.  If, on the other hand, you are convinced that naturalism is true, then you cannot, consistently with that conviction, accept theism -- whether or not you have a religious disposition.

It is also important to realize that if naturalism as we currently know it is false, it doesn't follow that some form of theism is true.  It doesn't even follow that no form of naturalism is true.  It could be that there is a version of naturalism, over the horizon, which will adequately answer the questions I mentioned.  If I have understood the thrust of Thomas Nagel's latest book, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012), that is what he is aiming at.  He is trying to find a way between naturalism in its current onfiguration and theism.  He wants to be able to see mind as somehow essential to the fabric of nature and not, as it must appear on evolutionary naturalism, as an accidental byproduct of purely physical processes. 

It is also worth noting that not all of the critics of contemporary evolutionary naturalism are theists.  If they were, then one might suspect that their criticisms were ideologically motivated.  Not so.  Nagel is both an atheist and an opponent of contemporary naturalism.  Given that Nagel's 'middle path' is merely a gesture in the direction of a possible distination, as opposed to a concrete alternative, I think it is resonable to accept theism given the hopelessness of naturalism.

2. Mystical, Religious, and Paranormal Experiences and Intuitions

Suppose that someone (i) has the religious disposition and (ii) agrees that theism is superior to naturalism.  That still might not do it.  Abstract reasoning, even to intellectual types who flourish in its element, is no substitute for experiences.  In fact, I doubt that anyone could really take religion seriously (in a way that would make a concrete difference in how one lives one's life) who lacked the sensus divinitatis, or the feeling that the deliverances of conscience emanate from a sphere beyond the human, or who never had a mystical glimpse or a religious experience, or who never lived through anything paranormal such as an out-of-body experience or an experience of pre-cognition.

This is not the place to try to explain the differences among mystical, religious, and paranormal experience and other senses, intuitions, intimations, visitations and vouchsafings  that religious types speak of.  But let me give a couple of examples of religious experiences, which I distinguish on the one hand from mystical experiences and on the other from paranormal experiences. 

One day many years ago I was pacing around  in an extremely agitated frame of mind over a matter that I won't go into.  But suffice it to say that my mind and heart were filled with extremely negative thoughts and desires.  Suddenly, without any forethought, I raised my arms to the ceiling and exclaimed, "Release me from this!"  In an instant I was as calm as a Stoic sage, as quiescent as a Quietist.  The roiling burden was lifted.  I was at peace.  I want to stress that that I had had no intention to pray.  The whole episode transpired spontaneously.  Now what happened?  Phenomenologically, my unintended, spontaneous prayer was answered.  Does that unforgettable experience prove that a Higher Power hears and grants some of our heart-felt requests?  No, for the simple reason that no (outer) experience proves anything.  My current visual experiences of this computer do not prove its existence.  But the religious experience is evidence of something Transcendent and if you have had such experiences you may be inclined to think that they carry a lot more weight than abstract reasoning from questionable premises.

On another occasion, while deep in meditation, I had an experience of -- or an experience  as of, to put the point with pedantic epistemological caution -- being the object of Someone's love.  "I am being loved by some unknown person" was my thought during the experience. That's what it felt like. I was alone sitting in the dark on the black mat.     It was an unmistakeable experience, but still only an experience.  A brain fart you say?  A random neuronal swerve?  Could be, but then our ordinary mundane experience could be a brain fart too -- only more coherent and protracted.

There are those who simply dismiss experiences like these.  That is a strange attitude, at once unempirical and dogmatically rationalistic.  See Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored.

It's a bit of evidence that I add to the other bits of experiential evidence such as a deep sense of the superficiality of ordinary human relations, and of the relative unreality and unimportance of the impermanent world.  Without experiences like these Plato, Augustine, Pascal, and Simone Weil could not have written what they wrote.

3. The Arguments for Theism

And then there are the dozens of arguments for theism which, taken together, make a strong cumulative case for theism's truth especially in tandem with the refutation of the atheistic arguments.

4. Conclusion

Now add it all together: the manifold inadequacies and outright absurdities of the naturalist/materialist/reductionist Weltanschauung, the wide variety of mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences, the deliverances of conscience, the testimony of beauty and order and purposivesness, and the rest of the intuitions, intimations and senses, the refutations of atheism and the arguments for theism -- add this all together, take it as a big cumulative case, and its just might take someone who has the religious disposition over the line into a living belief.

And THEN, and only then, comes the capstone that clinches it for someone like me:  "So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."   

The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

Is it ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence? If it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it is also irrational to act upon those beliefs, by entering a monastery, say. Or is it?

 

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. This has been called ethical evidentialism since that claim is that it is morally impermissible to believe on insufficient evidence.  Sufficient evidence is where there is preponderance of evidence.  On ethical evidentialism, then, it is morally permissible for a person to believe that p if and only p is more likely than not on the evidence the person has.

A cognitive evidentialist, by contrast, maintains that one is merely unreasonable to believe beyond a preponderance of evidence.  One then flouts a norm of rationality rather than a norm of morality.

Jeffrey Jordan, who has done good work on this topic, makes a further distinction between absolute and defeasible evidentialism.  The absolute evidentialist holds that the evidentialist imperative applies to every proposition, while the defeasible evidentialist allows exceptions.  Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence quoted above!  I take this as a refutation of Clifford's evidentialist stringency. For if one makes no exceptions concerning the application of the evidentialist imperative, then it applies also to "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  And then the embarrassing question arises as to what evidence once could have for the draconian Cliffordian stricture which is not only a morally normative claim but is also crammed with universal quantifiers.

If I took Clifford seriously I would have to give up most of my beliefs about politics, health, nutrition, economics, history and plenty of other things.  For example, I believe it is a wise course to restrict my eating of eggs to three per week due to their high cholesterol content.  And that's what I do.  Do I have sufficent evidence for this belief? Not at all.  I certainly don't have evidence that entails the belief in question.  What evidence I have makes it somewhat probable.  But more probable than not?  Not clear!  But to be on the safe side I restrict my intake of high-cholesterol foods.   What I give up, namely, the pleasures of bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  etc. is paltry in comparison to the possible pay-off, namely living  and blogging to a ripe old age.  Surely there is nothing immoral or irrational in my behavior even though I am flouting Clifford's rule.  And similarly in hundreds of cases.

The Desert Rat

Consider now the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?  Let us suppose that our man is a philosopher and thus committed to a life of the highest rationality.

Absolute evidentialism implies that the desert wanderer should suspend judgment and withhold assent: he may neither believe nor disbelieve of either source that it is potable or poisonous on pain of either irrationality or an offence against the ethics of belief.

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief  -- and doing nothing in consequence -- would clearly be the height of irrationality in a case like this.  The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.

He may be epistemically irrational, but he is prudentially rational.  And in a case like this prudential rationality trumps the other kind.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to evidentialist theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence and never believing on insufficient evidence.   In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for an embodied  human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe on grounds other than the evidential.  Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even, which is neither live, forced, nor momentous.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. 

But then absolute evidentialism is untenable and we must retreat to defeasible evidentialism.

The New Neighbors

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

In the cases just mentioned, one is waranted in believing beyond the evidence, but there are also cases in which one is warranted in believing against the evidence.  In most cases, if the available evidence supports that p, then one ought to believe that p.  But consider Jeff Jordan's case of 

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore reject absolute evidentialism, both ethical and cognitive.  We should admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that I (in consequence) have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

And what if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives better his last moments than he would have by giving up.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what?  What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Hitchens: No Understanding of Religion

Reading Christopher Hitchens' Mortality I was struck once again by how people like him have no understanding of religion at all.   Lacking as they do any religious sense, they can only (mis)understand it from the outside as if it were just a set of strange doctrines. They don't seem to understand that the doctrines are "necessary makeshifts," to borrow a fine phrase from F. H. Bradley,  whereby we undertake to understand the Transcendent.  Failing to appreciate the provisional character of doctrines and dogmatic formulations, people like Hitchens seize upon them as if they were the reality represented and then look for contradictions and absurdities. And of course they find them.  For example, Hitchens sees an absurdity in prayer:

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.  Half-buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-cancelling. (Mortality, pp. 21-22)

The context makes this this little 'chemo-brain' outburst even less clear, if that is possible.  Prayer, we are told, is the attempt to instruct God on how to set right what he has has got "all wrong."  Now that has nothing to do with what anyone who actually prays means by 'prayer.' Take Plotinus (205-270):

The only way truly to pray is to approach alone the One who is Alone [All-One]. To contemplate that One, we must withdraw into the inner soul, as into a temple, and be still. (Enneads)

Did chatterbox Hitchens ever withdraw into his inner soul and be still?  No?  Then what right does he have to speak of these matters?  This from the Talmud:

He who rises from prayer a  better man, his prayer is answered.

The point here, I take it, is that we don't pray to change God so much as to change and improve ourselves. If we succeed in this, if we succeed in stilling our thoughts, mastering our desires, strengthening our resolutions, and re-directing our aspirations from the base to the noble, then we have succeeded in improving ourselves and our prayer has been answered.  Here, in a similar vein, is Ralph Waldo Emerson from his great essay "Self-Reliance":

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

Hitchens has no understanding of religion or of prayer.  The two are closely linked as William James observed:

Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. (Varieties of Religious Experience, 464)

In his profound incomprehension, Hitchens takes prayer in its crassest petitionary sense, oblivious of the iceberg submerged beneath that paltry tip.

Lacking as he does the religious sensibility, Hitchens is devoid of all sympathy for it, and can't see anything good in it.  His understanding of it is the misundertanding of the outsider.  To understand religion from the outside is  like trying to understand music from the outside as a peculiar sort of acoustic disturbance.  But religion, like music, chess, love, poetry, mathematics, running, science . . . can only be understood from the inside by those who engage in these activities and have the inner predisposition and talent to engage in them.

The Schizoid Left: OK to Bash Mormons and Christians but not Muslims?

Many liberals in the West have become, and many more are becoming, radical leftists out to subvert the very principles that they as leftists supposedly support. Thus arises the phenomenon of the schizoid Left. For example, from the time of the French Revolution on, the Left has been anti-clerical and ever more anti-religious. But now we witness the bizarre spectacle of leftists aligning themselves with, or at least not opposing, the most extreme type of religious fundamentalism on the face of the earth. They never miss an opportunity to bash Christians and Mormons, but are deeply offended by the amateurish Innocence of Muslims.  Bret Stephens:

The film, the [Obama] administration says, is "hateful and offensive" (Susan Rice), reprehensible and disgusting" (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, "disgusting and reprehensible" (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

For a second example of schizoid leftism, consider that lefties traditionally display a prominent libertine and bohemian wobble. Why then do they cozy up to, or at least not resolutely oppose, Islamic fanatics who murder homosexuals, stone adulterers, and circumcise females?

Third, the Left, as part of the Enlightenment project, supposedly champions science over superstition. Yet, in the last 400 years or so, scarcely anything of any scientific value has emanated from the Islamic world. (Bernard Lewis is the man to read on this. ) The same goes for philosophy. Tiny Israel in the mere 64 years of its existence has cranked out more genuine philosophy that the whole of the Islamic world has in 400 years. So what does the Left do? It waxes anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic.

The nihilism of the hard Left -- its denial of value and true being to anything that actually exists and provably works -- may be turning in upon itself. Unable to destroy Western civilization under its own steam, it aligns itself with Islamists, who, were they to attain power, would of course mercilessly
exterminate all leftists. A curious sort of Selbstaufhebung.

For a leftist, the end justifies any and all  means, including ignoring the very real threats of militant Islam while demonizing Christians who pose no threat to speak of.  For  full documentation, see David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery 2004. 

On 'Spirituality' and 'Religion'

Nathaniel Torrey writes to request a link to his post, The Dalai Lama and the Non-Religion of the Future.  I am pleased to do so.  His thoughts are in line with the ones I expressed in a 25 September 2010 entry,

On 'Spirituality'

The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

How typical.  Being a good host, I didn't lay into her as I probably should have for her  'spiritual' good.

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that that gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

Escapism

Escapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from the only reality there is into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it.

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament (one dripping with dukkha as it were) to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, he reconnoitres the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save his cats.  A little cute, a little crude, but it makes the point.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

Image credit. 

Ross Douthat on the Free Exercise of Religion

An excellent column with discussion of the Chick-Fil-A 'flap.'

Scriptural Inerrancy Again

The following is from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous but who wants me "to hear a different perspective on the matter than that of the Calvinists who comment on your blog: I don't want you thinking they are the ones rightly interpreting the Christian texts."

...................

Jesus and Paul had a rather liberal interpretation of the Old Testament Law, by which I mean a non-literal, moralist interpretation. I shall explain this in further detail by offering a few exemplary statements from them both.

Jesus famously said that "What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them" (Mt 15:11), specifying what he meant a few verses later: "But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts — murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person" (vv. 18-20). This is directly contradictory to the teaching of the Old Testament Law; after a long list of animals the eating of which is strictly forbidden, Lev 11:24 reads: "You will make yourselves unclean by [eating] these." Jesus denies the literal truth of Lev 11:24 by denying the reality of ritual purity and impurity; instead he gave a spiritualized, moralist interpretation of purity and impurity: the only true (im)purity or (un)cleanliness is moral (im)purity or (un)cleanliness.

 

A further expression of the denial of the reality of ritual purity and impurity and, implied with this, a rejection of the temple sacrificial system of worship is involved in Jesus' quoting the verse from Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." When the Pharisees see that Jesus eats at the same table as many tax collectors and sinners -- i.e., those who would render him ceremonially unclean and incapable of participating in the temple cult, thus removed from the blessings of God -- Jesus responds that God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Mt 9:10-13). "Sacrifice" is connected to a concern for ritual purity, as well as participation in the temple religious system; what God wants is not this, but mercy towards those who are in need of love: particularly those rejected by the religious figures and "holy men" of his time. God evidently is not concerned with ritual purity; he wishes that men be kind to one another, and he makes an effort to show such kindness himself through Jesus. But a rejection of ritual purity, the requirement for sacrifice, the legitimacy of the temple, etc., is a rejection of a literal reading of many Old Testament texts.

 

Consider also Jesus' and Paul's affirmation that the true fulfillment of the Law is obedience to the command "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (see, e.g., Mt 22:34-30; Rom 13:8-10, Gal 5:14). This cannot be literally true, for the various ritual and ceremonial injunctions of the Law (e.g., regarding circumcision, dietary habits, sacrifices, etc.) cannot in any plausible way be interpreted as mere instances of love for neighbor; no one would ever get the impression that the command to circumcise one's child on the eighth day is an instance of "love thy neighbor" by reading the relevant OT texts. What this statement suggests, rather, is a non-literal and moralist interpretation of the Old Testament: what is really of value is the moral teaching about loving your neighbor; all that ritual and ceremonial stuff doesn't mean much of anything and can even at times be ignored.

 

One more example would be Paul's affirmations regarding the ultimate insignificance of circumcision: "A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code" (Rom 2:28-29); "Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts" (1 Cor 7:19); "Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation" (Gal 6:15). No one would ever come to such a conclusion merely reading what the Old Testament says regarding the requirement of circumcision: "Every male among you shall be circumcised. . . . My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people" (Gen 17:10, 13-14). Paul elevates obedience to the moral commandments of God, especially "love thy neighbor", above the command of circumcision, so much so that the latter command is effectively annulled.

 

No one would come to the conclusions that Jesus and Paul did merely by reading the salient Old Testament texts themselves; their interpretation is non-literal and moralist, and is merely one manifestation of the tendency towards spritualized, internalized interpretations of inherited religion that appears in other places (e.g., ancient Greek religion with the advent of the philosophers) as well. (For more on this, see Stephen Finlan, The Background and Contents of Paul's Cultic Atonement Metaphors (Boston: Brill, 2004), 47ff.)

 

 

BV comments:  I find the foregoing persuasive and would extract the following argument against inerrancy from it:

 

1. If the Scripture is inerrant, then no later passage revises, corrects, contradicts, annuls, or abrogates any earlier passage.

 

2. There are NT passages that contradict OT passages, e.g. MT 15:11 contradicts Lev 11:24. 

 

Therefore

 

3. It is not the case that the Scripture is inerrant.

 

The argument is valid in point of logical form.  If the first premise is not true, then I simply do not know what plenary inerrancy means. (I assume we mean by inerrancy plenary (full) inerrancy.  Otherwise I could maintain that my blog is inerrant, provided you ignore all assertions in it that are mistaken.  "It is everywhere inerrant except where it isn't.")  The first premise is true and so is the second as the anon. contributor demonstrated.  Therefore, the Scriptures are not inerrant.

 

ComBox open.  But if you comment, be BRIEF and address PRECISELY WHAT IS CLAIMED by the anonymous contributor.  Otherwise you will be unmercifully cast into the outer cyber-darkness where there is much weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

Protestants, Catholics, Purgatory, Inerrancy and Related Topics

My last post drew a number of e-mail responses.  Here is one, by Joshua Orsak.  Subheadings added.  The ComBox is open in case Professor Anderson, or anyone, cares to respond.

 

Purgatory

 

First I'd like to make a quick note on purgatory. Purgatory is found in the Apocrypha, the 10 or so books of the Bible found in the Septuagint, the Hellenized Jews' Scriptures and not in the Hebrew Scriptures. You find it in Tobit 12:9, 2 Maccabees 12:43-45 and Ecclesiasticus 3:30. Protestants don't accept these scriptures as divinely inspired, but the Catholic faiths (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic, etc) do. I don't want to expound TOO much on arguments for including the Apocrypha, but I want to say this. The Jews did not canonize their scriptures until around 90 AD. They did this, in part, because the Septuagint, in particular the books we call the Apocrypha, were being used against them by the Christians in debates over Jesus' place as messiah. Ironically, Protestants later excluded the books because they are not included in the Jewish' canon. Anderson's point about purgatory is confused. The issue is not whether purgatory is found in the Bible but which scriptures should be included in the Bible at all.

 

BV:  Perhaps the point could be put like this:  The question whether purgatory is to be found in the Bible is not a well-defined question, and is therefore unanswerable, until we decide which books are canonical. "You tell me which books make up the Bible, and I will tell whether there is Biblical support for a doctrine of purgatory." 

 

Inerrancy

 

As to whether the Bible supports plenary inerrancy, in my opinion it does not do this consistently. The Bible is a collection of books that take a variety of positions on various theological issues. They are more like conversations around the Revelation of God to the Israelite people (and later the church) than the Revelation itself. The Bible is not the Revelation, but the record of The Revelation. Just to give an example, Jeremiah 28:7-9 modifies the conditions by which we test whether a prophet is genuine from an earlier set of conditions laid down in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. In the latter case we are told that a prophet is only a true prophet if his prophecy comes true. Jeremiah says that this is true only in the case of a prophet that prophecies peace. If a prophet gives you an oracle that you like, that is in line with what you want to hear, then his prophecy must come true or he was a false prophet. But Jeremiah insists that any prophet that challenges you or gives you a word of judgment, i.e., tells you what you do not want to hear, is a true prophet regardless of whether his prophecy comes true.

 

In the New Testament, the writers often quote passages out of context, and take them to mean something different than the original writers thought they meant. They take prophecies about the return from Babylon to Israel under Persian rule and talk about them as if they are messianic. This is not lying, from the writers' perspective. At the time the New Testament was written, it was believed that the truths behind scripture were hidden even to the original writers, and one needed the Spirit to guide one to dig into the hidden meaning behind the text. It is the Holy Spirit, and not scripture, that is primary in the New Testament, and it is guidance by the Spirit (rather than, say, the Pope) that gives credence to one's understanding of scripture. Jesus does this all the time in Matthew. He quotes scripture "you have heard it said" and then replaces or modifies it "but I say unto you...". Jesus has the authority to 'bind and loose' the law (to bind the law is to make it more strict, to loose it is to make it less strict, this was the pharisees' understanding of what a teacher was supposed to do). This authority derives from the Spirit. Just to give one example, think about Matthew 9:1-12. Jesus says that the allowance of divorce, found in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 did not derive from God but from Moses, clearly implying that not all of scripture comes from God alone. Jesus then goes to a rather ambiguous passage from Genesis to clarify what our attitude towards divorce should be.

 

The Danger of Bibliolatry

 

This is just the beginning of a sketch of a Biblical argument, but I'd say you are on firm BIBLICAL ground when you reject plenary inerrancy. There are certain passages that do seem to support that doctrine, but there are many, many more passages that indicate a vastly different way of approaching scripture. God should be the center of our theology, not a book. Experience and reason have to play a role. The Bible is not a constitution that restricts our limits our relationship with the Divine, it is rather a long and storied history of one people's (or two peoples') relationship with God and how God revealed Himself to them over an extended period of time. It includes their reflections on that revelation. It has a lot to say to us, and gives form and function to our own experience. Without it, we'd be starting pretty much from scratch. I love the Bible and it plays a central role in my relationship with God. But if it becomes the end-all be-all it becomes idolatrous in its own right. Bibliolatry is a subtle but I think very dangerous form of that terrible sin.

 

I find myself in broad agreement with Pastor Orsak.  Here is the slant on scripture I took in Four Slants on Scripture:

 

C. Scripture is a product of divine-human interaction. It exists contingently and does convey divine revelation. But it is not inerrant. It contains errors and defects that reflect the fact that it is a product of
divine-human interaction. God may be an impeccable transmitter, but we are surely not impeccable receivers.  There will be plenty of human 'noise' mixed in with the divine 'signal.'  God is not the author of the Bible, various human beings are the authors, but some of these at some times are writing under inspiration and thus are drawing truths from a transcendent source. Although the Book contains divine revelation, it is not the Last Word. Nor is it impossible that divine revelation is to be found in such writings as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Dhammapada, not to mention 'inspired' philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus.

The Bible as the Christian Faith's 'Constitution'

James N. Anderson has a thought-provoking post entitled Ecclesial Activism.  A key idea is that the Bible is to the Christian  faith as the U. S. constitution is to the U. S. government.  And just as judicial activism is a Bad Thing, so is ecclesial activism.  The Roman Catholic Church comes in for a drubbing as the main engine of ecclesial activism:

If the Bible didn’t say something something that the bishops wanted it to say, or thought it should say, they could claim to “discover” new doctrines in the Bible — purgatory, indulgences, apostolic succession, papal infallibility, etc. — and no one would have power to overrule them.

Adapting the candid statement of Chief Justice Hughes, today’s Roman Catholic might well put it thus: “We are under the Bible, but the Bible is what the Pope says it is.” In fact, that’s exactly how things stand in practice. Functionally the Pope has become the highest governing authority in his church: higher even than the Bible. The church has been derailed by “ecclesial activism”.

I find it rather ironic then that in recent years a number of politically conservative evangelicals (J. Budziszewski, Francis Beckwith, and Jay Richards are three prominent examples) have swum the Tiber. Presumably they take a dim view of judicial activism. Shouldn’t they be equally averse to ecclesial activism?

When it comes to ecclesiology, Protestants are the true conservatives and the true constitutionalists.

Not being a theologian, I hesitate to comment on Anderson's post.  But I'll make a couple of maverick comments.  First, if a doctrine of purgatory cannot be found in the Bible, then I would consider that to be a lacuna in the Bible. The doctrine strikes me as not only extremely reasonable but also necessary:  at death, almost none of us will be ready for the divine presence, and yet some us will not deserve hell.  Therefore . . . . 

On the topic of indulgences and papal infallibility, I too find these doctrines untenable if not absurd, but not so much because they cannot be found in the Bible -- assuming that is true -- but for philosophical reasons.  The idea that there is an economy of salvation that can be quantified and regulated  and administered is the rankest superstition.

So you see my  bias:  I don't understand sola scriptura and I reserve the right to think for myself.  Question:  Is the sola scriptura principle itself scripturally based?  I apologize if that, to the cognoscenti, is a cheap-shot question.

It is worth noting in passing that it was his inability to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility that was the main cause of Franz Brentano's leaving of the Catholic priesthood, and later, the church. See here.

Can an Irreligious Person Really be a Conservative?

John Derbyshire asks and answers his  question.

Q. Can an irreligious person really be a conservative?

A. Of course he can. The essence of modern conservatism is the belief in limited government power, respect for traditional values, patriotism, and strong national defense. The only one of those that gets snagged on religion is the second. But while traditional Western society has had a religious background, it has usually made room, at all points of the political spectrum, for unbelievers. Plenty of great names in the Western cultural tradition have been irreligious. Mark Twain, America's greatest writer, was a complete atheist; and one has one's doubts about Shakespeare. In any case, as Bill Buckley has pointed out somewhere, the key word is respect. Respect for traditional values implies respect for religious belief, even if you don't share it. The really interesting question is not "Can an irreligious person be a conservative," but "Can a militant God-hater be a conservative?"

I'd go a bit further than that. Conservatism, including (including especially, I think) religious conservatism, has at its core an acceptance of, a respect for, human nature. We conservatives are the people who see humanity plain, or strive to, and who wish to keep our society in harmony with what we see. Paul Johnson has noted how leftists always used to talk about building socialism. Capitalism doesn't require building. It's just what happens if you leave people alone. It arises, in short, from human nature, and only needs harmonizing under some mild, reasonable, laws and customary restraints. You don't have to build it by forging a New Capitalist Man, or anything like that.

Leaving people alone, I like. Capitalism, I like. Social harmony, I like. Human nature . . . Well, it has its unappealing side. I don't count religious feeling as necessarily on that side, though; and I do count religious feeling — stronger in some individuals, weaker in others, altogether absent in a few — a key component of the human personality at large. To be respected ipso facto.

Exactly right.

Conservatism, Religion, and Money-Grubbing

This from a reader in Scotland:

I'm a first year undergraduate philosophy student with some very muddled political views. My father has always been a staunch supporter of the Left to the point of being prejudiced against all things on the conservative or Right side as 'religious' and 'money grubbing' . I never questioned any of his beliefs until perhaps a year or two ago. Now that I have began studying philosophy I cannot ignore this lazy neglect and the time has come to develop my own political views.

The next time you talk to your father point out to him that there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require that a conservative be religious. There are conservative theists, but also plenty of conservative atheists. (I am blurring the distinction between religion and theism, but for present purposes this is not a problem.) Below you mention David Horowitz. The Left hates him for being an apostate, but his conversion to conservatism did not make a theist of him. He is an agnostic. Conservatism at one end shades off into libertarianism, one of the main influences on which is Ayn Rand. She was a strident atheist.

Opposition to conservatism is often fueled by opposition to religion. But surely one can be conservative without being religious just as one can be religious without being conservative. There is a religious Right, but there is also a religious Left, despite the fact that 'religious Left' is a phrase rarely heard. Here in the States a lot of liberal/left mischief originates from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. (One may well doubt whether these gentlemen are worthy of the 'R' honorific, not to mention the 'G' honorific.)

As for 'money-grubbing,' you might point out to your father that there are money-grubbers on both the Right and the Left, and that there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require that a conservative be a money-grubber. In fact, studies have shown that conservatives are much more charitable and generous than liberals/leftists. See Conservatives are More Liberal Givers. It is sometimes said that capitalism has its origin in greed. But this is no more true than that socialism has its origin in envy.

To feel envy is to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others. Now suppose someone were to claim that socialism is nothing be a reflection of envy: a socialist is one who cannot stand that others have things that he lacks. Driven by envy alone, he advocates a socio-political arrangment in which the government controls everything from the top, levelling all differences of money and status, so that all are equal. Surely it would be unfair to make such a claim. Socialism does not have its origin in envy, but in a particular understanding of justice and what justice demands. Roughly, the idea is that justice demands an equal distribution of money, status and other social goods. Conservatives of course disagree with this understanding of justice. What we have are competing theories of justice. Just as it is a cheap shot to reduce socialism to envy, it is a cheap shot to reduce a free market approach to greed.

It was namely for the philosophical content that I started reading your blog but I gradually became enthralled with your conservative views . They have uprooted many of my fickle Left-leaning political ideas . Now I am left increasingly uncertain about many political questions that I commonly held as beautifully obvious. I have began noticing the phenomenon of 'political correctness ' at University and am not entirely sure what to think of it.

 

Are there specific books you recommend for anyone who wants to find some sense in this Liberal climate ? I have been considering picking up some of Horowitz' writings.

I am glad that my writing has had the effect of opening new perspectives for you. Unfortunately, universities have become hotbeds of political correctness and indoctrination when they should be places where ideas of all sorts are critically and openly examined. I would recommend Horowitz to you, in particular, Destructive Generation, Left Illusions, Radical Son, and Unholy Alliance. He has also written a couple of books on the politicization of the universities. Among academic philosophers, I recommend the works of John Kekes.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Death and Resurrection

Johnny Cash, Ain't No Grave
Johnny Cash, Redemption
Mississippi John Hurt, You've Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley
B. B. King, See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Blind Boy Grunt (Bob Bylan), Gospel Plow
Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die
Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus
Johnny Cash, Hurt
Johnny Cash, Final Interview.  He speaks of his faith starting at 5:15.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."

Good Friday Meditation: Wittgenstein on Christianity

From Culture and Value, p. 32e, tr. Peter Winch:

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief that is appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative!–don’t treat it as you would another historical narrative! Make a quite different place for it in your life.–  There is nothing paradoxical about that!

The "nothing paradoxical" may be an allusion to Kierkegaard who is discussed in nearby 1937 entries.  For Kierkegaard, it is is absurd that God should become man and die the death of a criminal, but this absurdity or paradox is precisely what  the Christian believer must embrace.  Wittgenstein appears to be rejecting this view, but also the view that S. K. also rejects, namely, that Christianity is grounded in verifiable historical facts such as that Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans, died, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. 

I interpret Wittgenstein to be saying that Christianity is neither an absurd belief nor an historically grounded one.  It is a groundless belief, but not groundless in the sense that it needs, but lacks, a ground, but in the sense that it is a framework belief that cannot, because it is a framework belief, have a ground and so cannot need one either.  Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

But is it true?

When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the cynical, "What is truth?"  Presumably, the Wittgensteinian fideist cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity.  If it is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs  that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself. 

Here is where  the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me.  No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life?  And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games.  But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel.  What then is the difference between Christianity and chess?  Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself.  Christianity does so purport.

Here is an extended post on Wittgensteinian fideism.

The Divine Job Description

For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts.

What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?

I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)

1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.

But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)

If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.

"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job -- the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all -- won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.

If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman -- not below but beyond the personal and the human. As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism.

2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Or maybe we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.

Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.

3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value.

4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.

When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.

What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .

John Hick's Religious Ambiguity Thesis

John Hick maintains that

     . . . in this post-Enlightenment age of doubt we have realised that
     the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains
     non-religious as well as religious responses. (An Interpretation of
     Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Yale University
     Press, 1989, p. 74)

Hick identifies non-religious with naturalistic and religious with theistic responses. I would argue that this identification is mistaken since a religious response to the universe need not be theistic (as   witness Buddhism), and a naturalistic response to the universe can be religious (as witness Spinozism). This quibble aside, it is true that theism is a religious response to the universe, and that most   contemporary naturalisms are non-religious responses to it. To simplify the discussion, then, we may identify a religious response with a theistic response and a non-religious response with a naturalistic response.

Hick's religious ambiguity thesis thus boils down to the claim that the universe allows, permits, sustains both a theistic interpretation and a naturalistic interpretation. Hick's case for the thesis involves"showing the inconclusiveness of the various philosophical arguments on both sides." (75) Hick tries to do this by surveying a number of theistic and naturalistic arguments.

But this suggests a question. Is the universe intrinsically such as to permit both theistic and naturalistic responses? Is religious ambiguity an intrinsic property of the universe? Or is it a relational property, a property it has only relative to beings who conceptualize it in different ways?

As the opening quotation suggests, Hick intends his thesis to be an avowal of the intrinsic religious ambiguity of the universe: it is the nature of the universe as it is in itself to allow or permit mutually exclusive interpretations. He says confidently that we have "realised" that the "the universe" is religiously ambiguous. But this thesis of intrinsic religious ambiguity is not supported by his argument. At the most, all his argument shows is that arguments on both sides of the issue are inconclusive, and thus that the universe is religiously  ambiguous for us. It does not show that the universe is religiously ambiguous in itself.

Indeed, it is difficult to understand what the latter could mean. How could the universe in itself be neither such that it was created by God, nor such that it was not created by God? In itself, the universe cannot be religiously or metaphysically ambiguous. The ambiguity is on our side, residing in our incapacity to arrive at a rationally compelling view one way or the other.

In this predicament we must decide what we are to believe and how we are to act. A leap of faith is required. But whether one's faith is naturalistic or religious, it affirms something about the universe in itself. As far as I can see, Hick has not made a compelling case for his claim that the universe in itself is religiously ambiguous.

Wittgenstein on Religious Faith and Superstition

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72:

Religious faith and superstition are quite different.  One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

Although Winch's translation is correct, I would translate ganz verschieden as 'entirely different.'  For in American English at least, 'quite' can mean either 'very' or 'entirely.'  Glaube (faith) and Aberglaube (superstition) are, says Wittgenstein, entirely different.  I agree.  It follows that religion cannot be a species of superstition.  It is not as if the genus superstition divides into religious and nonreligious species.  And as Aberglaube suggests, superstition is a degenerate form of faith, which is what I have been maintaining.

But is it true that superstition arises from fear while religious faith does not arise from fear but is a kind of trust?  I don't think so.  "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  So arising out of fear cannot be what distinguishes religious faith from superstition.  It is worth noting that Wittgenstein himself believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (CV, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

Perhaps we could say that superstition arises from mundane fear, fear concerning the body and the things of the body, while religious faith does not arise from such fear, but from fear concerning the soul and its welfare.  But this is not what Wittgenstein says.  Religious faith is a trusting.

A trusting in God, but to do what?  Presumably not to supply us with the material necessities of life or to save us physically from life's trials and tribulations.  Perhaps one can makes sense of Wittgenstein's notion of trust in terms of his early experience of  "feeling absolutely safe" recounted in a lecture on ethics from 1929.  "I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'" (LE 8)

The feeling of being absolutely safe is the mystical sense that deep down, and despite appearances, everything is perfect and that one is ultimately safe and secure.  But surely as indigent bodies in a world of bodies we are not safe and secure. So who is the ME that nothing can injure no matter what happens?  Me as individual soul?  Me as eternal Atman?   If I am at bottom an individual soul confronting God my Judge, then the mystical feeling of being absolutely  safe is illusory, is it not?  How can I be absolutely safe as individual soul if I am to be judged and perhaps found unworthy of entering the divine presence and then either annihilated or sent to hell?  If I am at ontological bottom the eternal Atman, then I am absolutely safe and nothing can touch me -- but this does not comport well with the notion of God as Judge.

Wittgenstein says that superstition is a sort of false science.  That is essentially what I said when I said that a necessary condition of a superstitious  belief is that it be or entail erroneous beliefs  about the  causal structure of the natural order.  But I think we are both wrong.

Suppose a soldier is pinned down behind some rocks under withering fire.  There is nothing he can do.  So he prays.  Supposes he prays that his  life be spared by divine intervention.  There needn't be any "false science" involved here in the way false science is involved in the childish belief that stepping on a sidewalk crack will break your mother's back.  And yet the soldier's prayer is superstitious in the way that the prayer, "Thy will be done,"  is not.

Some Putative Counterexamples to My Definition of 'Superstitious Belief'

I hazarded the following definition:

Belief B is superstitious =_df (i) B is or entails erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of the natural world; (ii) B makes reference to one or more supernatural agents; (iii) B involves a corruption or distortion of a genuine religious belief.

The conditions are supposed to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient.  Several people wrote in to question whether conditions (ii) and (iii) are necessary.  What about:  blowing on dice; avoiding walking under ladders; carrying a rabbit's foot, etc.

First off, these are not beliefs  but practices, and I had set myself the narrow task of defining 'superstitious belief.'   Second, it is not clear that  the people who engage in the aforementioned practices need have any underlying beliefs about the practices or their efficacy.  The gambler who blows on his dice before throwing them may simply be mimicking what he saw some other gambler do, a gambler he thought 'cool.'  Same goes for a liitle leaguer who crosses himself at the plate just because he saw some big boy do it.  Monkey see, money do.  The kid may have no idea what the gesture signifies.

But suppose our gambler really does believe that blowing on the dice will enhance their likelihood of coming up the way he wants.  Then (ii) and (iii) go unsatisfied.  But is the belief in question a counterexample to my definition?  Not unless it is a superstitious belief, which is what I deny!

"But doesn't the belief in question satisfy the dictionary definition?"  Yes, it does, but so what? I am not trying to give a lexical definition.  A lexical definition, or dictionary definition, aims to describe how a word or phrase is actually used at the present time within some linguistic community.  But if you think philosophical insight can be had by consulting dictionaries, then you commit what I call the Dictionary Fallacy.  People say the damndest things and use and misuse words in all sorts of ways riding roughshod over all sorts of distinctions.  When a misuse becomes widely accepted then it goes into the dictionary since dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive.

But it occurred to me that there is a problem with my definition.  A belief can be superstitious even if it doesn't involve any erroneous beliefs about nature and her workings.  Consider again the plastic dashboard Jesus.  Suppose the motorist believes, not that the hunk of plastic has causal powers relevant to the prevention of automotive mishap, but that the divine person represented by the icon will be inclined to intervene in the natural world in prevention of mishap because he is being honored by the motorist.  Such a motorist could be a trained physicist who harbors no false beliefs about nature's workings.  (Divine intervention needn't involve any violation of natural laws.)  I want to say that that too is a case of superstition.  If it is, it is not captured by my definition. 

Defining 'Superstitious Belief'

Superstition is a form of pseudo-religion, a degenerate or distorted form of religion.  But what exactly is it and how does it differ from genuine religion?  Let's start by asking what sorts of item are called superstitious.  There are (at least) superstitious beliefs, practices, and people.  Perhaps we should say that a person is superstitious if he habitually harbors superstitious beliefs and engages in superstitious practices.  Since practices are underpinned by beliefs, perhaps we can make some progress by trying to define 'superstitious belief.'

Go back to my example of the plastic dashboard Jesus icon.  The hunk of plastic has both physical and representational properties.  But properties of neither sort induce in the hunk any causal powers of the sort that are relevant to the prevention of automotive mishaps.  Now if the motorist  believes to the contrary, then he is superstitious -- this seems to be an exceedingly clear paradigm case of superstition -- and part of what makes him superstitious is that he harbors erroneous beliefs about the causal workings of nature.  So it seems that part of the definiens of 'superstitious belief' is

1. an erroneous belief about the casual structure of nature.

If (1) is a necessary condition of a belief's being superstitious, then the mere belief that God exists or that unembodied/disembodied souls exist is not superstitious.  Obviously, the belief that there are entities transcendent of nature needn't involve any false beliefs about nature.  We have to avoid the mistake of identifiying superstitious beliefs with beliefs about the supernatural.  That would be on a par with the mistake of thinking that religion just is superstition.

But (1), though necessary, is not sufficient.  For not every  erroneous belief about nature's workings is a superstitious belief. When I was a young child I got it into my head that my left arm had to be stronger than my right arm because, being right-handed, I used my right arm more and my left arm less with the result that the power of the left arm was preserved while the power of the right arm was reduced.  My childish belief was 'logical' in way, but empirically false.  Flexing a muscle is not like flexing a piece of metal.  The former typically strenghtens, the latter typically weakens.  But there was nothing superstitious about my false belief.    A second example is the gambler's fallacy which, though sometimes classified as a superstition, is not one by my lights.  So it looks as if we need to add a second necessary condition along the lines of

2. That makes reference to a supernatural agent.

Thus in the case of the dashboard Jesus what makes the belief superstitious is not the attribution to a hunk of plastic as a mere hunk of plastic of causal powers it cannot possess; it is the attribution of such powers to a hunk of plastic that is also iconic or representational, the item represented being a supernatural agent.  If the icon were melted down into a non-representational blob, then the superstitious motorist would presumably no longer consider it causally efficacious in warding off danger.

But now it appears that our two necessary conditions are not jointly sufficient.   I am assuming that superstition is a form, but not the only form, of pseudo-religion.  (Idolatry and blasphemy may be other forms.).  As a form of pseudo-religion, superstition is a degenerate or corrupt or distorted form of genuine religion. Now suppose our motorist is a member of a Satanic cult and has on his dashboard an icon that represents some demon or maybe the head honcho of demons, old Mephistopheles himself.    And suppose our satanist believes that the presence of that icon (made of the molded excrement of a sacrificed cat) will protect him from the dangers of the road.  Then both (1) and (2) will be satisfied without the satanist's belief being superstitious.  So I add a third necessary condition:

3. and involves a corruption or distortion of a genuine religious belief.

Example.  A kid makes the sign of the cross as he steps up to the plate in a baseball game.  If the kid believes that the gesture will increase the likelihood of his connecting with the ball, then he has an erroneous belief about natural causation.  But that is not enough to make his belief superstitious.  Nor is it enough if we add the  reference to a supernatural agent.  We need to add the third condition.    The genuine religious belief being distorted here is the belief that one's spiritual salvation depends on right relation to God, a right relation that can be secured only via the mediation of Jesus Christ. This genuine religious belief may be false but it is not superstitious: it does not involve any erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of nature.  The distortion consists in the invocation of Jesus and his self-sacrifice for a paltry mundane self-serving and ego-enhancing purpose having nothing to do with salvation.

This seems to do the trick.   My claim is that my three conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a belief's being superstitious.  Counterexamples anyone?

Superstition: More Examples

A reader comments:

You write that “Superstition in this first sense seems to involve a failure to understand the causal structure of the world or the laws of probability” and that it is a “necessary (but not sufficient) condition of a belief's being superstitious is that it entail one or more erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of nature.” I’m curious about what you think of the following case:

A young Christian claims to be harassed by demons. He experiences the harassment, he claims, only during the late hours of the night in his room. His pastor advises the kid to anoint with oil, in the shape of a cross, the door frame to his room (the idea being that such an anointing will “ward off” the demons). 

Do you think this is superstitious? After all, oil is in the relevant sense “material stuff” just as much as a plastic Jesus is. However, the oil is not intended to have a causal effect in nature, but in “the spiritual realm.” I think examples like this are common among religious people. It may not be hard to find one that intuitively counts as superstitious (as another example, consider how Catholic priests are often asked to bless houses or rooms before a Catholic takes up residence in them). What you think of these kinds of cases?

The more examples the better.  Yours is importantly different from the plastic Jesus example in which a power is imputed to a physical thing that it cannot have, the power to protect the vehicle and its occupants from a natural threat.  (Contrast this with the power a properly fastened seat belt has to prevent the driver from going through the windshield in the event of a crash.)  In your example there is imputed to a physical stuff, oil, the power to protect against a physical or spiritual threat emanating from a purely spiritual being.  Since this is a power that oil cannot have, whether applied in the shape of a cross or not, I would say that this type of practice and the underlying belief are superstitious as well.

It is worth noting, however, that a false belief can have a real effect.  Believing, albeit falsely, that he has done something efficacious to ward off demons, the kid may feel reassured and comforted.  The pastor's belief that the kid's daubing the door frame with oil will have a beneficial psychological effect on him is not superstitious.

I once knew a chess player who always wore the same ridiculous little hat, filthy and tattered, at tournaments.  This was his 'lucky hat.'  Donning it, he geared up for chessic combat.  This may or may not be a superstitious practice depending on the underlying belief.  If he believes that the mere donning of the hat directly influences the outcome of games, then the belief is superstitious, or at least bears one of the marks of a superstitious belief.  But there would be nothing superstitious about the belief that donning the hat puts him in a fighting frame of mind, which in turn does have a real effect on his play.

Or consider an airline pilot who suits up prior to a flight.  Donning his uniform, he steps into his role.  'Looking the part' he inspires confidence in himself and in his passengers.  This confidence has a slight but real effect on his performance in the cockpit.  So far, nothing superstitious.  Superstition would come into the picture if the pilot thought that the mere donning of the uniform enhances his skill set, that the insignia, say, have the power to confer upon him good judgment or motor control.

 This is a difficult topic.  Surprisingly little has been written on it by philosophers.  In the JSTOR database I found only four articles, three from the 1930s.  If we don't know what superstition is, then we won't know what genuine religion is either.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes ?

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

An Example of a Religion Without Superstition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we need to make this really clear are definitions of 'religion' and 'superstition' ('pseudo-religion').  But definitions in this area are very difficult to come by.  And it may be that religion and superstition are both family-resemblance concepts that are insusceptible of rigorous definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions of application.

On the Mormon Concept of God

I should thank (or perhaps blame) Spencer Case for sidetracking me into the thickets of Mormon metaphysics.  But I have no cause to complain seeing as how my motto is "Study everything, join  nothing."  Earlier I made a preliminary response to some of Spencer's concerns about the "facelessness" of the full Anselmian conception of deity.  Here I am not concerned to defend that conception in all its aspects.  Indeed, I will concede arguendo all of the following for the space of this post:  divine simplicity is incoherent; divine simplicity is inconsistent with the doctrine of the Trinity; the latter doctrine is incoherent; and so is the doctrine of the Incarnation. I make these concessions to focus the issue and to make clear that my interest as a philosopher is neither apologetic nor polemical.  I want to put Blake Ostler and other Mormons at ease: I am not here interested in attacking their faith or defending the sort of God conception found in Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas.  Philosophy is first and foremost inquiry; its purpose is not to attack or defend any worldview.  It does not exist to shore up or legitimate antecedently accepted worldviews or ideologies. (So it is not ancilla theologiae, not the handmaiden of theology or of natural science or of anything else.)  Religions are worldviews; philosophy as inquiry is no more a worldview than is mathematics or physics.  It is also important to note that if the Augustine-Anselm-Aquinas conception is incoherent it doesn't follow that the Mormon conception is coherent: they could both be incoherent.

The issue I will discuss is precisely whether the following assertion by A. A. Howsepian is true:  ". . . nothing countenanced by Mormon metaphysicians could possibly count as God." ("Are Mormons Theists?" Religious Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, Sept. 1996, p. 367)  Since I am not familiar with the particulars of Mormon doctrine, I will simply assume that they are what Blake T. Ostler says they are in his response to Howsepian in  "Worshipworthiness and the Mormon Concept of God," Religious Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (Sept. 1997), pp. 315-326.  So what I will be doing is examining Ostler's view of the the Mormon conception of God with an eye to deciding whether it is an adequate God conception.

1. The Anselmian Criterion  of Deity

Obviously, not just anything could count as God.  So we need a criterion of deity.  According to the Anselmian criterion, which both Howsepian and Ostler accept, at least in the main, it is a matter of broadly logical necessity that nothing could count as God that is not the greatest conceivable being (GCB).   The Anselmian provenience of this notion is clear: God is "that than which no greater can be conceived."  The greatness of the GCB consists in its unsurpassibility in respect of all perfections or great-making properties.  The GCB possesses all great-making properties and the highest degree of those that admit of degrees.  Among these properties are the traditional omni-attributes, e.g. omniscience.  Only the GCB is an adequate object of worship.

Let's note that if a being is unsurpassable by any being distinct from itself it does not follow that it is unsurpassable, period.  For it might be "self-surpassable in some respects." (Ostler 315) Obviously, a being that was unsurpassable by any other but self-surpassable could not be actus purus inasmuch as it would have to  harbor unrealized potentialities.  We ought therefore to distinguish an unmodified and a modified GCB criterion:

Unmodified:  If a being counts as God, then that being is unsurpassable in point of perfection by any being, including itself.

Modified:  If a being counts as God, then that being  is unsurpassable in point of perfection by any being distinct from itself.

2.  Does the Mormon God Satisfy the Modified Anselmian Criterion?

It is obvious that the Mormon God cannot satisfy the unmodified  criterion since that criterion leads to the ontologically simple God in whom there is no composition of any kind, whether of form and matter, act and potency, essence and existence, supposit and attributes.  Since Mormons can reasonably reject ontological simplicity, they needn't be fazed by the unmodified criterion.  Ostler maintains, however, that the Mormon concept of God can satisfy the modified criterion.  It may have a chance of doing so if 'God' is construed as 'Godhead.'  (319).  This Godhead, Ostler tells us, is the one supreme being. (319)  If henotheism is the view that there is at least one God, then the Mormon view as Ostler presents it is henotheistic.  If monotheism is the view that there is exactly one God, then the Mormon view is not monotheistic.  Ostler tells us that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three distinct Gods. (319) So there are at least three distinct Gods in the Mormon pantheon, which prevents the view from being strictly monotheistic.  They are nonetheless one Godhead in that the three "divine personages" are united "in love and unity." (320)

Each of the divine persons is "corporeal" and "located in a particular space-time." (320)  The Godhead, however, is not corporeal, at least if Godhead is the same as Godhood.  Ostler employs both of these terms without explaining whether or how they differ.  (320) My impression is that he is using them interchangeably.  If that is right, then Godhead/Godhood is not corporeal.  This is because ". . . Godhood refers to the immutable set of properties necessary to be divine. There is only one Godhood or divine essence in this sense." (320-321, emphasis in original)  Presumably, an immutable set of properties is not corporeal.  The same goes for a set of immutable properties, and a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are immutable properties.

How are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost related?  They are related in a "relationship of divine love" which is "contingent and not necessary." (321) It is contingent because "Love is a voluntary attitude freely chosen." (321)  "The divine persons can kenotically empty themselves of the divine glory by separating themselves from the divine unity of the Godhead." (321)  Despite this ability of the persons to separate themselves from the unity of the Godhead,

. . . there always has been and always will be a God in the sense of divine persons united as one. The divine persons obviously can so plan that there will always be at least two joined as one to govern the universe. (321)

The individual divine persons are subject to "eternal progression," progression in knowledge, power and dominion.  (321) Does it follow that "Godhead as a whole" or "God-as-divine-persons-in-relationship" is subject to eternal progression?  No it doesn't, says Ostler, and to think otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of composition.  This is the fallacy with which Ostler taxes Howsepian. 

3. Preliminary Evaluation

My question is precisely this: Does the Mormon conception of God/Godhead, as explained by Ostler, satisfy the modifed Anselmian criterion?  The modified criterion requires that a candidate for GCB status  be necessarily unsurpassable by another, but allows the candidate to be self-surpassable in some respects.  Ostler tells us that

. . .there cannot be a greater being than God qua the divine persons united as one Godhead in Mormon thought.  God is necessarily unsurpassable by any other being. (323)

Here is one difficulty I am having.  Ostler claims that the divine persons are contingently related to each other.  It follows that the Godhead as the unity of the persons contingently exists. Please note that if x always existed and always will exist,it doesn't follow that x necessarily exists.  (If x exists at all times in the actual world, it does not follow that x exists in every possible world.)  If the divine persons "c an so plan that there will always be at least two joined as one" (321, emphasis added), it doesn't follow that they must so plan.  Now if the Godhead contingently exists, then there can be a greater being than "God qua the divine persons united as one Godhead," namely, a being having the same properties bu existing necessarily.

I conclude that the Mormon conception as explained by Ostler cannot satisfy the modified Anselmian criterion.  For whether God/Godhead is or is not self-surpassable, he must be a necessary being.  But he can't be a necessary being if the divine persons are merely contingently related. If they are contingently related, then they are possibly such as to be unrelated.  But if they are possibly such as to be unrelated, then their unity is possibly nonexistent, i.e. not necessary.  So it looks as if Howsepian is right in his claim that ". . . nothing countenanced by Mormon metaphysicians could possibly count as God."

Does Ostler have an escape via his talk of Godhood as opposed to Godhead?  (320-321) Godhood or "the divine essence" is "the immutable set of properties necessary to be divine."  This set counts as a necessary being unlike Godhead which we have seen is a contingent being.  But although metaphysically necessary, Godhood cannot be the one God who is "the governing power of the enture universe."  For no such abstract object as a set can play that role.  But, to be charitable, I won't hold Ostler to his talk of a 'set.'  Let us take him to mean a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are the divine attributes.  It too is a necessary being, but it too is causally impotent and cannot be the governing power of the entire universe. 

In sum, Godhead is powerful but contingent while Godhood is necessary but powerless.  To satisfy the modified Anselmian criterion, Ostler needs a being that is both necessary and powerful. 

Obama's Assault on Religious Liberty

Quotable:

Here is what is particularly worrisome: the state seems no longer satisfied with a slow but steady evolution toward secularity; it is aggressively forcing Catholic hospitals off the stage, for it is creating for them an impossible situation. If they cave in and provide insurance for these verboten procedures, they have effectively de-Catholicized themselves; and if they refuse to provide such insurance, they will be met with fines of millions of dollars, which they cannot possibly pay.

In either case, they are forced out of business as Catholic. And this seems, sadly, to be precisely what the Obama administration wants.

At the University of Notre Dame, on the occasion of his receiving (controversially enough) an honorary degree of laws, President Obama publicly and vociferously pledged that he would provide for a "conscience clause" for those who wanted, for religious reasons, to opt out of a policy they find objectionable. But with this recent mandate, he has utterly gone back on his word.

The secularist state recognizes that its principle [sic! read 'principal'] enemy is the Church Catholic. Accordingly, it wants Catholicism off the public stage and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism's totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I'm dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually.

It's not a rhetorical bomb but the plain truth.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature, a nature  manifested every day.  The author ought to ask himself whether it makes sense to be so polite and civil toward an administration that is not only the enemy of what he represents, but also mendacious in its hiding of that fact.

John Hick

John Hick has negotiated that mysterious transition that awaits us all.  Here is one take on his passing.  I saw him in action only once.  I recall him questioning whether Jesus ever claimed to be God.  An ill-mannered colleague of mine attacked him for that, churlishly.  Hick retained his equaninimity, projecting a superiority that was yet without a trace of superciliousness.  That impressed me and furnished me with yet another insight into the hierarchy of the spirit and the inequality of human beings. 

Hick's An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent is required reading for philosophers of religion.  I have two posts on Hick.

John Hick on Religious and Naturalistic Definitions of Religion

No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

Religion and Superstition

Julian Baggini asks: Can a religion survive being stripped of its superstitions?

Baggini does not tell us explicitly what he understands by  'superstition,' but the context suggests that he takes the term to apply to any and all supernatural elements in a religion, whether these be beliefs, practices, or posits such as God and the soul.  The supernatural, in turn, is anything beyond or 'outside of' the system of space-time-matter, or anything that makes reference to such things.   God conceived of as a bodiless person, as in mainstream Western monotheism,  would then count as a supernatural being.  Accordingly, belief that such a person exists would count as a superstitious belief, and prayer in all its forms (petitionary, intercessory, contemplative, etc.) would count as a superstitious practice.

Supposing (counterfactually) that this is true, one might be tempted to make the journey to the East in quest of a religion free of superstition.  One of Baggini's points is that Buddhism as actually practiced by millions is rife with it, as witness motorized prayer wheels, etc.  Baggini's main thesis is that a religion stripped of supernatural elements ceases to be a religion.  A Buddhism naturalized, a Buddhism disembarrassed of all such elements, is no longer a religion but something acceptable to secularists and atheists, "a set of beliefs and practices to cultivate detachment from the impermanent material world and teach virtues such as compassion and mindfulness." 

Baggini's claim is that what is specifically religious about a religion are its superstitious beliefs, practices, and posits.  To put it another way, every religion is essentially superstitious.  But of course 'superstitious' is an adjective of disapprobation: a superstitious belief is  a false or groundless belief; a supersitious practice is one that is ineffectual; a superstitious posit is one that does not exist.  So in claiming that religion is essential superstitious, Baggini is claiming that it is essentially false, ineffectual, and devoid of reference to reality.

Of course, I disagree.  For one thing, I reject what Baggini assumes: naturalism.  But I also disagree because he rides roughshod over a fairly elementary distinction.

There is religion and there is pseudo-religion.  Superstition is pseudo-religion.  That adherents of religions are often superstitious in their beliefs and practices is undeniable.  But to the extent that they are superstitious they are pseudo-religious.

Let's consider an example. A believer places a plastic Jesus icon on the dashboard of her car. It seems clear than anyone who believes that a piece of plastic has the power to ward off automotive danger is superstitious. A hunk of mere matter cannot have such magical properties. Superstition in this first sense seems to involve a failure to understand the causal structure of the world or the laws of probability. A flight attendant who attributes her years of flying without mishap to her wearing of a rabbit's foot or St. Christopher's medal is clearly superstitious in this first sense. Such objects have no causal bearing on an airplane's safety.  It is magical thinking to attribute to bits of plastic and metal the powers the superstitious attribute to them.

But no sophisticated believer attributes powers to the icon itself, or to a relic, or to any material thing qua material thing. The sophisticated believer distinguishes between the icon and the spiritual reality or person it represents.  

Well, what about the belief that the person represented will ward off danger and protect the believer from physical mishap? That belief too is arguably, though not obviously, superstitious in a second and less crass sense. Why should the Second Person of the Trinity care about one's automotive adventures? Does one really expect, let alone deserve, divine intervention for the sake of one's petty concerns? How can religion, which is about metanoia -- change of mind/heart -- be justifiably hitched to the cart of the mundane ego?

I don't think it can be denied that much petitionary and intercessory prayer is superstitious.   Someone who prays to win the lottery is superstitious  as is a person who, upon winning, exclaims, 'There is a God after all.'   The nauseating egotism of such a remark is antithetical to genuine religion.  But suppose I pray for a friend who has contracted a deadly disease.  I pray, not for some divine intervention into the course of nature, but that he be granted the courage to endure his treatments, and should they fail, the courage to accept his death with hope and trust and without rancour or bitterness.  It is not obvious that such an intercessory prayer (or a similar petitionary prayer should I be the sick man) is superstitious despite its invocation of a transcendent power to grant courage and equanimity.  'May the Lord grant you peace' is a prayer for a spiritual benefit.  Unless one assumes naturalism -- which would be question-begging--  there is nothing obviously superstitious or pseudo-religious about that.  An even better example would be, 'Let me see my faults as clearly as I see the faults of others.'  Such a prayer is a prayer for the weakening of the ego and to that extent not motivated by any crude materialism.

The sophisticated non-superstitious believer is not trying to achieve by magical means what can only be achieved by material means; he is aiming to achieve by spiritual means what cannot be achieved by material means but only by spiritual means. Perhaps we can characterize superstition as pseudo-spiritual  materialism.

Getting back to the icon on the dashboard:  what if the icon serves to remind the believer of her faith commitment rather than to propitiate or influence a godlike person for egoistic ends? Here we approach a form of religious belief that is not superstitious. The believer is not attributing magical powers to a hunk of plastic or a piece of metal. Nor is she invoking a spiritual reality in an attempt to satisfy petty material needs. Her belief transcends the sphere of egoic concerns.

To sum up.  Assuming that religion necessarily involves supernatural elements, religion and naturalism are incompatible.  So if naturalism is true, then religion is buncombe, a tissue of superstitions.  But there are powerful reasons for rejecting naturalism.  In any case, that all of religion is bunk is rather hard to swallow given its prevalence and usefulness.  (Here one can mount a pragmatic argument premised on the consensus gentium.)  It is a good bet that there is something true and right about a cultural and a symbolic  form that has won the adherence of so many distinguished people over all the earth in all the ages.  But if we are to make sense of religion as a cultural form that has a core of rightness to it, then we need the distinction between religion and pseudo-religion (superstition) -- the very distinction that Bagini clumisly rides roughshod over.  (Can one ride in a clumsy fashion?)

Companion post: Grades of Prayer

 

Is Religion for the Weak?

We haven't heard much from Jesse Ventura recently, leastways not on the topic of religion, but I recall him some years ago saying in effect, 'Religion is for the weak!' at which provocation various religionists jumped up and retorted, 'No it's not!' Such knee-jerk opposition avails nothing. Ventura is in fact right. What Ventura doesn't appreciate, however, is that we are all weak. The correct response to Jesse 'The Body' Ventura is not one of diametrical  opposition but one of ju-jitsu-like concession.

We are all weak relative to a standard of true strength. We are weak  in body, in mind, in will. We vacillate in our affections. A body that   can lose its strength in a split-second due to a brain aneurysm, say, is only relatively, contingently, and temporarily strong. Such strength is nothing to crow about. Or is Ventura's strength so awesome that it is proof against every contingency? Can he maintain it indefinitely? Is he causa sui? If not, then why is he so proud of his prowess?

The great religions teach the simple truth about our weak and indigent condition. (Whether these religions provide a genuine solution to it is another question.) The proper counter to Ventura is to point out to him that the sense in which he thinks that religious people are weak is not the sense in which they know that we are all weak. Religion is  not a projection of the merely contingent weakness of some of us, but a sober recognition of the necessary weakness of all of us. Religion doesn't exist to make good the deficiencies that we can and must make  good by our own efforts, but to ameliorate the deep-going deficiencies  that none of us can ameliorate individually or collectively by our own efforts.

Cottingham, Wittgenstein, and the Religious Impulse

John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52:

     . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound
     sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to
     be . . . .

This is not quite right, as it seems to me, even if '"would wish to be" is read as "ought to be."   The sense of the gap  between 'is' and 'ought' is undoubtedly part of the religious impulse,  but there is more to it than this. It must be accompanied by the sense that the gaping chasm between the miserable wretches we are and what  we know we ought to be cannot be bridged by human effort, whether  individual or collective, but requires help from beyond the human-all-too-human.   Otherwise, the religious sensibility would  collapse into the ethical sensibility. There is more to religion than ethics. The irreligious can be aware of the discrepancy between what  we are and what we should be. The religious are convinced of the need for moral improvement together with a realization of their impotence in bringing it about by their own efforts.

I had an undergraduate professor whose symbol for religion was:

 

I like that because it conveys that religion is for the sick.  And sick we are.  An awareness of our root sickness is an element in the religious sensibility.  Dubious as Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion is, he is absolutely on target in the following observation:

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect (unvollkommen), as ill (krank).  Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched (elend). (Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Winch, p. 45e, emphasis in original)