On the other hand, I did like something Julian said in part 3 of Heathen’s Progress, on the putative truce between religion and science.
First he cites the bromide, science asks “how” questions, religion asks “why” ones.
It sounds like a clear enough distinction, but maintaining it proves to be very difficult indeed. Many “why” questions are really “how” questions in disguise. For instance, if you ask: “Why does water boil at 100C?” what you are really asking is: “What are the processes that explain it has this boiling point?” – which is a question of how.
Critically, however, scientific “why” questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, “why” is usually what I call “agency-why”: it’s an explanation involving causation with intention.
So not only do the hows and whys get mixed up, religion can end up smuggling in a non-scientific agency-why where it doesn’t belong.
This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.
That’s very useful.
It’s funny, too, that people do that. The idea is that a mega-meta-person is a more satisfying answer than a mere process or brute fact. But why is it? Given that you can ask “why” about the mega-meta-person, you would think that answer would be satisfying only for a few seconds, or a few minutes for the indolent. I don’t really get why “it just did” or “no one knows yet, but people are looking” is less satisfying than “a mega-meta-person did it.” Not to mention that the latter is a great deal less plausible than the former.
A lot of it is just plain laziness. It is so much easier to postulate a final answer to everything than to withhold judgment and deal with the intricacies of the real world. When your kids start acting up and say, “Why should I follow your rules?”, you can reply, “Because God says so, that’s why”, instead of getting bogged down in a morass of ethical philosophy.
I had to hold my nose to get through the opener, but parts 2 and 3 were pretty good overall, actually quite gnuish in many places.
But I still bridled at this part:
Calling it a “fact”, even with qualifications, is very misleading. Yes, some religions are compatible with most known scientific facts. But none is compatible with the scientific method. Equating the word “science” with a collection of disjointed facts is not acceptable; the definition of science must also include the process by which we know these facts are reliable.
“Why?” is rather a loaded question anyway, as it implies a priori that there is indeed a “why”. If there’s no god, it follows that there’s no why.
If a mega-meta-person did it, then such a person may do other things too. Help you in future, give you a life after death, etc.
Comforting to many. Heck, I would like to “know” of such help; unfortunately an illusion is insufficient for me, but many people don’t accept it is an illusion.
Yes, but why would he? What’s so special about you compared to this mega-meta-person? Who, I might add, is also responsible for all the bad stuff that is happening.
It could partly be a bit of over-zealous evolutionary programming. Being able to spot agency is a valuable thing: why is that bush rustling? It’s better for survival if we err on the side of caution (better to assume there’s a tiger in the bush and give it a wide berth, even though this wastes food-gathering time than to assume there isn’t and get eaten). Perhaps this colours our intuition about what kinds of answer are satisfying. Studies have shown that children and even babies are very much inclined to spot agency. Perhaps its something we have to train ourselves to not do and some people haven’t – for whatever reason – quite been able to do it.
Not only have we evolved to err on the side of agency, there’s also a misleading but very seductive consequence: if the reason things happen the way they do is that a mega-meta-person wants them to happen that way, then maybe we could make friends with the mega-meta-person and he’ll make things happen the way we want them to! That is, supernatural agency — gods and demons — implies we could have a personal relationship with the agent and get stuff done for us, like becoming a court favourite to a powerful king; it suggests the possibility of magic. Physical answers to “why” questions imply there’s no magic, and if we want things to happen the way we want we’re going to have to do the work ourselves.
I guess religious believers have a more optimistic sense of how charming they are than I do. I never simply assume I’m going to be able to ingratiate myself with some super-powerful Big Boss.
Then again I’m also less optimistic (than the apparent norm) about the benevolence of super-powerful Big Bosses. I tend to assume they’re shits.
People DON’T think it through. That’s the problem. That religion is bollocks may seem crushingly obvious to you, but that is because you have gone through an intellectual process in order to form this conclusion. There are presumably lots of different reasons why adult theists haven’t gone through this process, though it’s no secret that emotional barriers often play a part. (Another reason, more taboo to discuss, is that some people simply aren’t very clever.)
Converting to Atheism is kind of like giving up smoking IMO. It’s clearly the correct thing to, all the available evidence suggests you should, and you inevitably suffer if you don’t. But many people don’t quit, because they are not prepared to put up with the difficult struggle that comes with doing so.
More obsequious than charming, I guess. That’s where all the ritual comes in. We live in a big Skinner Box, bombarded by apparently random stimuli and maybe that’s why we’re so prone to developing superstitions. Skinner’s pigeons behaved in a way we’d call rational when faced with predictable links between action and reward, but did crazy things when the pellets came at random. They falsely connected whatever they were doing at the time with the appearance of the reward.
Don’t we tend to do the same? Isn’t that more or less what rituals are?
I think it’s the rituals that are supposed to do all the heavy lifting. Perform the sacrifice – or at least act out the silly proxy for sacrifice – and you’ll get the pellet.
I have a suspicion that all the ‘personal relationship with god’ business is either rationalisation or gussying up. It’s all about the anxiety of not following the rules or performing the rituals.
But I’m getting off-topic. What I’m trying to say is that perhaps the satisfaction in an agency-based explanation comes partly from the facts that we’re predisposed to detecting agency – whether it exists or not – and that we tend to conflate agency with ritual. The latter provides opportunity for fine-tuning of the former: we pray and sometimes get what we want, which strengthens our belief in both god and the ritual. We tend to overlook the failures, of course. Perhaps that’s again partly due to the economies of the situation.
Mostly speculation, of course.
One curious feature of the mega-meta-person answer to the question of why or how things happen the way they do is that believing in such a person doesn’t seem to have made people more humane. Indeed, quite the reverse. The ages of faith have been much more oriented towards cruelty than ages when faith has been in question.
I think I have something of an inkling of why this may have been so, and it is essentially for the same reason that the religious think that the answer to the problem of pain is so easy. If you take the world as it is as a model of how things are set up by super-person to whom we owe obeisance and obedience, it stands to reason that our own attitude towards the suffering of others should be just as callous and indifferent as the world of nature seems to our own sufferings, and the suffering of other sentient beings. At least it makes sense to regard the sufferings of others with detachment, if, as claimed, the world set-up is the product of some kind of über person. The fact that this über person is now more and more doubted — even, I think, by those who claim most urgently that he/she/it exists — means that we more naturally think that suffering is (or could or should be) under our own control, or it is not controlled at all. This makes us more compassionate and humane.
But this just means that believing in an über person turns out not to be a very helpful explanation of the way things are, because, whether this mega-meta-person is conceived of as cruel or kind, hateful or loving, makes not a shred of difference to how things go. Surely, that’s a good indication that the conception of such a person is doing no explanatory work.
Yes yes yes yes yesyesyes.
That’s one of my most basic atheist-reasons. If you think a good god made it all, you think it’s all good, and it’s not, it’s not it’s not it’s not. If you think it’s all good you’re complicit with evil, and that’s bad.
All the more reason to try and get on their good side.
The modern view of god is that “He’s” benevolent, but that wasn’t always the default assumption. I think it’s really very recent; it’s an artifact of monotheism and an uneasy one. People didn’t used to assume the Powers that Be were necessarily kindly. They could be shits at least some of the time. They just wanted those shits to like them. When I was very small I had the same idea about monsters. If I ever encountered one I figured I would try and befriend it. Then maybe it wouldn’t hurt me.
It’s odd to me that believers don’t see how their god-belief contains the vestiges of this sort of thing. Evangelicals love to go around saying “My God is an Awesome God” and “God is great” and “Thank you, Jesus!” every other minute, as if the creator of the universe really needs to be told you appreciate that good lunch you had and he’ll be ticked off if you don’t lick his ass often enough.
Very true; the idea that god is love and always has been is just as bogus as the compassion-is-central idea.
It’s recently occurred to me that I don’t remember ever having the slightest feeling of love or “worship” or anything the slightest bit affirmative about “god” as a child. I don’t think that’s just a blank in the memory, either; I’m pretty sure I never did. I know I absolutely hated both church and churchiness (and fortunately got very little of it). I knew adults said there was a God but that’s about it.
My first reaction to that claim about the ‘agency-why’ of religious questions is that it really isn’t that at all. Religions don’t ask why things happen because they really want a ‘how’ answer, they want – and claim to deliver – a real ‘why’ answer, a purpose answer. The great cry of religion, the opiate that it gives to the people, is that there is meaning and purpose in life, grounded and guaranteed from on high, immanent in all actions and events, no matter how seemingly meaningless and tragic.
Even within Xianity, the argument about who is responsible for certain things happening – God, Jesus, Mary and the saints, Lucifer and his minions – is not settled, but the notion that overall life has purpose resolutely is. The fact that the priests can’t explain what that purpose is, or how little Timmy getting run down by the firetruck furthers it, is just their cop-out.
Any good Christian can tell you why water boils at 100 degrees C. It’s in Leviticus somewhere. I’m sure I’ve seen it. Religion answers all “why” questions doncha know.