Furthermore
Another point about this strawman argument we keep getting from rabbis and bishops, this ‘argument’ that boils down to claiming that non-theists have a ‘belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured’ and then following that absurd claim with the equally absurd claim that love, morality, beauty and god are all ‘face[s] of human experience that [are] not subject to empirical verification.’
The other point (see above) is that that endlessly repeated pseudo-argument is a crap argument from two directions, not just one. It’s bad and stupid first, as I mentioned, because it dishonestly or woollily or confusedly makes a truth-claim about the existence of an entity, a being, in the view of theists a person, equivalent to evaluative thoughts and emotions such as love, ethics, awe, beauty, when they are quite different kinds of thing. That amounts to a large and glaring category mistake. On the one hand you have questions, controversies, discussions about whether Napoleon, King Arthur, Achilles, Marco Polo, Paul Bunyan, Mata Hari was or was not a real person who actually existed. On the other hand you have discussions of what we mean when we talk about love, beauty, good, bad, better, worse. Those are different kinds of thing. I think we can all agree on that? Am I right? Napoleon did or did not exist; a yes or no question; an empirical question. Napoleon was good or bad; a complicated question, not a yes or no; a question with empirical elements but also with other elements.
That’s one reason Lerner’s argument is a bad one, but there’s another reason, that comes from another direction. It’s bad because it relies on a claim that questions about the evaluative as opposed to the factual category are absolutely and entirely non-empirical questions, and I think that’s nonsense, and stultifying nonsense at that. It is not the case that there is nothing empirical to say or to discover about love or ethics or beauty (though it may be the case about god, though not about religion or belief). It is not necessary to think that statements such as ‘beauty is an excitation of this particular set of neurons’ are all there is to say on the subject, to think that they are some of what there is to say on the subject. The idea that empirical inquiry is completely beside the point and even profanation is just a way of sealing off one whole useful way of exploring the subjects; what would be the point of that? Why not inquire into both what is going on in the brain when we watch the sun set over mountains and what we experience when we watch the sun set over mountains? Rabbis and bishops don’t get to monopolize whole areas of life such as emotions and judgments merely because they want to assimilate them to their fuzzy ideas of what god might be. They also don’t get to wall them off from close examination merely because they want to protect that fuzzy god who tends to melt away into nothing when people look at it too hard.
“It’s bad because it relies on a claim that questions controversies discussions about the evaluative as opposed to the factual category are absolutely and entirely non-empirical questions,”
OB, is there something missing here or is it just my own lack of cognitive ability?
Maybe I’ve got it, yes, if I put a comma after ‘questions’ and an ‘and’ after ‘controversies’ then I see. Yes, now it all fits together.
Dennett has a good essay about making first-person experience into third-person reportage of that experience in order to talk about it. It’s in a discussion of “the hard question” of consciousness.
You can experience love and beauty, and you can experience something you call ‘God’, but all you have is experience unless you bring that experience out of yourself as a report of your experience.
For most people most of the time perhaps, experiencing beauty and especially experiencing love is all they ever want to do with it. If those who experience ‘God’ would be content to keep that to themself then no one will ever challenge them on it. But if they want to talk about it with other people, the only thing they can talk about is their report of their experience. And while it would be pointless to challenge the report’s veracity (it’s their experience) one can challenge everything else about it and examine it in every possible way. And that’s before you move into the neurological area.
I found the Dennett essay quite easily, so here it is if anyone’s interested. Actually, this is a PDF file which appears to have replaced the one I read. At least it looks very much like it.
“Who’s On First? Heterophenomenology Explained,”
“Rabbis and bishops don’t get to monopolize whole areas of life such as emotions and judgments merely because they want to assimilate them to their fuzzy ideas of what god might be. They also don’t get to wall them off from close examination merely because they want to protect that fuzzy god who tends to melt away into nothing when people look at it too hard.”
Sadly they do. They ought not to be able to monopolise whole areas of life, but in many places at many times they do; but not here on B & W fortunately.
Those who use the “love exists even though you can’t objectively measure it” claim to support their claim that “God exists” have conceded the atheists’ point: gods, like love, are subjective products of human minds and exist nowhere outside of those minds. Why else would they be so similar in this way?
“God” is the way (many) people experience some things in the world, rather than something in the world they experience.
But they don’t -really- believe that god is like love, what many of them are doing is a sort of sneaky reverse metaphor. Christians say god is love, as a sort of metaphor, if they then pretend they mean it literally they can wriggle out of the objections to their religion (probably with some kind of reference to how they are ‘sophisticated’ theists), then they can sneakily reverse their identity claim back into a metaphor, and voila, we’ve still got god.
You can’t objectively measure love, but you can point to its position on a scale in terms of outcomes. Hitler’s love for non-aryan humanity = round about zero %
Most newborn baby’s mothers love for their baby = 100%
It is therefore not a wholly abstract concept, such as worshiping Brian’s sandal or gourd.
I wonder. It seems like putting things on a scale and comparing them is measuring them. And would suggest you are measuring love in terms of outcomes that you believe stem from it.
So if you want to measure someone’s worship, couldn’t you likewise assign outcomes to it and measure them?
Actually, I think religious ‘belief’ is something very akin to an emotion or perhaps is an emotion dressed up as something else – a desire for there to be a ‘God’. For example, we don’t talk about “intensity of belief” in conclusions logically drawn.
In that case worship, behavior based on the assumption that the desire is reality designed to reinforce that assumption and the worshipper’s connection to it, would be what sets religion apart from other emotions.
I mean, how is that different from someone who is absolutely smitten with the school beauty queen and convinces himself that the object of his desire reciprocates his affection but due to social pressures can’t act on it?
It would be interesting to interview someone like that about their belief and their feelings about it and do fMRI scans of their brain, and then do comparable interviews and scans with a religious believer and see whether all the same areas are active in the same way.
Juan “I mean, how is that different from someone who is absolutely smitten with the school beauty queen and convinces himself that the object of his desire reciprocates his affection but due to social pressures can’t act on it?”
How did you know I felt like that ?
“Actually, I think religious ‘belief’ is something very akin to an emotion or perhaps is an emotion dressed up as something else – a desire for there to be a ‘God’.”
I think that’s spot-on. And some religious people realize as much, and acknowledge it – but unfortunately a lot don’t; a lot confuse the desire/hope with factual belief, and then go on from there to berating people who don’t share their quasi-belief. The rabbi and the bish do just that, when if they really faced the implications of what they’re saying, they might be less arrogant and aggressive about it.
Funny about brain scans and beauty queens, I’ve just been thinking about the brain and passion and addiction – wondering if they take place in the same part of the brain. In other words if the obsessive, needy, compulsive aspect of love/infatuation is the same thing as addiction.
I think it is funny and sad that people will constantly argue that a different group of people is wrong for not believing the same way or in the same things about a subject which they profess not to believe in. Wouldn’t your time be better spent ignoring the religious and just doing your own thing? Why does it seem that atheism and “non-theism” are built around anti-religion and not somthing else? To put it another way, if you don’t believe, fine, drop it and talk about what you do believe (other than that you believe that people that believe are wrong, of course).
No, Hank, the whole point of this comment is that the believers in question are not just getting on with their own believing and leaving non-believers alone, they are presenting arguments that non-believers are wrong. The arguments are bad arguments. Mere or personal belief is one thing and argument is another thing, and there is every reason to point out what is wrong with bad arguments.
Hank – “if you don’t believe, fine, drop it and talk about what you do believe”
I’ll quote directly from Lerner:
“I’ve used the word “spiritual” as a label to identify a meaning-oriented approach to politics. Its focus is on the yearning of human beings for a world of love and caring, for genuine connection and mutual recognition, for kindness and generosity, for connection to the common good, to the sacred and to a transcendent purpose for our lives.”
Thus atheists, myself included are accused of being unable to form a political stance embracing “love and caring, for genuine connection and mutual recognition, for kindness and generosity, for connection to the common good, …”.
Well, those are the things I believe in (albeit worded in a rather woolly manner), but this particular theist’s assertion, like many others is incorrect, if not downright stupid and insluting. Why not correct their senseless jibes ?