Instrumentalist theology
So yesterday I asked, with reference to Theo Hobson’s argument, ‘how do you go about seeing god as the source of all goodness, all life if you don’t believe god exists? How can god’s existence be a non-question if you’re going to have gratitude to that god for being the source of all goodness, all life?’ and Jerry S answered ‘A lot of people in the non-realist tradition think something like this. I think Robin LaPoidevin makes this kind of argument, for example (check out my interview with him in New British Philosophy)’ – so I did. He asked an interesting question in that interview.
Robin Le Poidevin had said this about instrumentalist theology as opposed to the realist variety:
Presumably an atheist could see theological discourse as being fictional, but it would be a fiction that we can do without. Theological instrumentalists, on the other hand, would say that the fiction has a crucial point…[T]heological discourse and practices enable us to lead better lives, even though they are fictional.
JS asks if there isn’t a danger for non-realist theism that despite the claims of its advocates that it’s a fictional discourse, it is in fact almost invariably taken as comprising truth-claims? (Just what I’m always saying.) Then he adds that ‘this is worrying both if you have a commitment to the value of truth* and also because a lot of awful things are done in the name of religious belief.’ Le Poidevin answers the awful things part rather than the first part, then there’s the interesting question.
But if you’re an instrumentalist, you’re doing more than simply articulating a philosophical position. You have the thought that the rituals that go along with religious practice are desirable, and so on. However, there’s a lot of research that suggests that people get seduced by ritual, so whatever might be claimed about the status of religious language, people won’t be able to avoid believing and acting as if the fictions they espouse are actually statements about matters of fact. And religious discourses are frequently predicated on exclusionary relations – they often divide up the world into the righteous and the unrighteous. Surely, whatever the status ascribed to religious language by non-realist theorists, this is a worry?
Le Poidevin says that’s a very interesting argument, but gives what I think is a rather unconvincing answer: he agrees that people get caught up in and even lost in fictions, but then concludes with:
But it would be surprising if someone, without actually losing contact with the thought that this is just a fiction, became intolerant of people who didn’t want to join in.
Well, I don’t think it would be at all surprising. We hear the instrumentalist case all the time. We don’t usually hear it from people who say at the outset that ‘this is just a fiction,’ but we do hear the instrumentalist argument all on its own, with the question of the truth of the central proposition left entirely unaddressed, as if it were either irrelevant or somehow settled precisely by the instrumentalist case – you know: belief in god makes you good therefore god exists. So I don’t think it would be surprising.
JS tactfully changed the subject at that point.
*Little did he imagine when he asked that question that in a few short years he would be writing a book on that very commitment to that very value in collaboration with some Yank woman he’d never so much as heard of at the time, any more than she’d ever heard of him at the time. Little did she imagine either, but then she wasn’t the one asking Robin Le Poidevin a lot of questions, was she. Well exactly.
I shouldn’t really tell you this in public – because it sounds immodest – but LaPoidevin was sufficiently worried, or disconcerted, or something, by that second line of argument that he emailed me about it afterwards. Trouble is, I can’t remember what he said – except I think that he would have to think about it more. (I’m think there was other stuff.)
Victor Reppert at dangerousidea.blogspot.com recently linked to a C.S. Lewis essay “Man or Rabbit?” criticizing instrumentalist defenses of religion. I’m sure you’d like it. You and C.S. Lewis would get along just fine ;-)
Yeah well he was right, it is an interesting question. It made me perk right up as I read it, even before I got to his reply.
Oh yes, Merlijn, I just dote on dear Jack! :- )
Despite pretty much agreeing with everything you say about theism, we, that is human beings, seem to have some need for ritual – or at least formal ceremony. This is the sort of thing that Welfare State tapped in to with their naming ceremonies and funerals. Some of this is covered in the book “Engineers of the Imagination” (http://www.welfare-state.org/pages/pubpages/engineers.htm)
and in two others specifically dealing with birth and death.
The Dead Good Book of Namings & Baby Welcoming Ceremonies (http://www.welfare-state.org/pages/pubpages/baby.htm)
The Dead Good Funerals Book (http://www.welfare-state.org/pages/pubpages/funerals.htm)
Civil Partnership ceremonies are perhaps another indicator of our need to mark significant events with some form of ritual. I think it is probably this need that drives us to create the fictions we call religion.
I know, I know – that’s why I agreed with that part of what Julian said. I really do agree with that. It’s very hard to create real secular equivalents – equivalents that have the same punch. There’s always the Leni Riefenstahl kind of substitute, but let’s not go there – cf. the thing about being seduced by rituals.
I bet that’s why I like Folk Life, come to think of it. That’s something of a secular ritual, and I like it, in spite of the heaving crowds. Or because of the heaving crowds, despite the discomfort they cause.
Oh, my head hurts.
Irrelevant detour: the Leni Riefenstahl comment reminded me of Brownie’s post at Harry’s Place some time ago (March 4) to be exact, in which he defends the David Irving conviction (wrongly, IMO) and makes an interesting comment on the scene from “Cabaret” where the blonde, Aryan Nazi kid in the uniform starts singing “Tomorrow belongs to me” and everybody joins in. Brownie recalls a mixture of revulsion and almost exhilaration at viewing the scene. I had exactly the same sentiment: horror mixed with an unpleasant and most unrequisited awe at the beauty of it all.
I suppose it’s the same with Riefenstahl. Triumph des Willens is probably dated: but it’s still a visual masterpiece. Most Fascist “art” is absolutely awful: buxom blonde girls frolicking about in the Teutoburger Wald and all that. But Riefenstahl, or the painter Pyke Koch’s steely-eyed Aryan hero self-portrait, or Orff’s music? Or what of the high points of Stalinist totalitarian imagery? To me at least, there is a Siren’s song-like attraction in the promise of losing yourself, your individuality and eventually your aloneness in race, or nation, or state. Or indeed religious group. That combined with a worshipping of raw power kind of thing.
One of my favourite novels is Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”. The protagonists, four oddball Classics students, engage in some kind of Dionysiac ritual which goes horribly wrong. When at the end of the novel, one of them is asked why he did it, he answers something like: “For once, I wanted to live without thinking”.
Now excuse me, have to go polish my jackboots.
“JS tactfully changed the subject at that point.”
Actually, I didn’t in real life. I can’t remember exactly the line of argument I used – possibly referencing Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory – but certainly the argument that I made was that one would exactly expect that exclusionary relations could develop on the basis of a fiction (which is what Tajfel’s stuff shows – at least that is one reading of it).
Or maybe I talked about soccer crowds or something.
I was pretty damned impressive, whatever it was! ;-)
Thanks for the reference, Merlijn.
Extract from Lewis’s ‘Man and Rabbit’:
If Christianity should happen to be true, then it is quite impossible that those who know this truth and those who don’t should be equally well equipped for leading a good life. Knowledge of the facts must make a difference to one’s actions.
The fine logical mind of the moralist-theologian in action again: if my grandmother should happen to be tram, she would have wheels. QED. This stuff is inadvertently hilarious.
Further down this two-page essay, CSL conflates ‘materialists’ with Bethamite utilitarians. And CSL is supposed to be the creme de la creme of Christian 20th-century thought. Naturally he is far too astute to do anything as demeaning to the religious mind as providing evidence for his assertions. Yet Another Christian Divine.
“It requires unusual qualifications, and some of them of a feminine cast, to become a leading theologian. A man must not only have appropriate abilities, and zeal, and power of work, but the postulates of the creed that he professes must be so firmly ingrained into his mind, as to be the equivalents of axioms. The diversities of creeds held by earnest, good, and conscientious men, show to a candid looker-on, that there can be no certainty as to any point on which many of such men think differently. But a divine must not accept this view; he must be convinced of the absolute security of the groundwork of his peculiar faith,—a blind conviction which can best be obtained through maternal teachings in the years of childhood.” — Francis Dalton, Hereditary Genius, 1869.
galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/text/pdf/galton-1869-genius-v3.pdf
It’s very hard to create real secular equivalents – equivalents that have the same punch.
I don’t accept that (why am I always disagreeing with you?). Went to a fabulous secular wedding two weeks ago, great fun and quite moving. My mother’s Catholic funeral was bleak, a perfunctory service which didn’t even touch the believers. My father-in-law’s secular funeral was more comforting than my mother’s, even though most folk in the audience knew it really was the end with no Man-In-Sky now looking after him.
I think what really makes the difference is the triggering of some fundamental monkey group identification instinct. Others around you feeling the same and when it is grieving, doing some group altruism to make each other feel better. The Churchy types have a well polished routine for doing that, Humanists on the whole don’t, especially for coping with the bads as opposed to the good bits.
The Fascists, Nazis and Communists certainly tapped into that as well, for different ends admittedly. Powerful stuff.
We hear the instrumentalist case all the time. We don’t usually hear it from people who say at the outset that ‘this is just a fiction,’ but we do hear the instrumentalist argument all on its own, with the question of the truth of the central proposition left entirely unaddressed, as if it were either irrelevant or somehow settled precisely by the instrumentalist case – you know: belief in god makes you good therefore god exists.
Yes, and people (like you and me) should continue asking one question and one only:
But is it true?
What is missing is the courage to say: Vigeat veritas et pereat mundus ( may the truth flourish even though the world may perish ). [Schopenhauer]
The unfortunate fact is that the truth can indeed be subversive. That the sky may fall in is indeed a possibility. So what? All very brilliantly put in the introduction of Steven Goldberg’s ‘When Wish Replaces Thought’ (some day perhaps I’ll scan it in, along with extracts from his magisterial ‘Why Men Rule – the Inevitability of Patriarchy’.). But didn’t you make much the same point in ‘Why Truth Matters’, or were you perhaps too optimistic about epistemic truth and progress going hand in hand? (I must check my well-thumbed copy of WTM but these goddam wimmin hyperventilating about their dream job of being recruited as Greek rural constables is taking up too much of my time this evening. And I was looking forward to a quiet week of armchair philosophising ….)
Perhaps the only compromise is to do the Leo Strauss routine: don’t proclaim godlessness from the rooftops, the servants might start stealing the spoons. One doesn’t have to lie or even deceive oneself, but one doesn’t have to rub it in, Dawkins-style.
Mea culpa Whoosh, Italics, whoosh …
Now what did I tell you? Especially about using italics just for quotations – which is where you messed up the closing one here?
Don’t do it!
You’ve got Tingey using bold now. Just what I needed.
“Actually, I didn’t in real life.”
Ah – just on the page.
That sounds quite interesting, really. I don’t suppose you have it transcribed?
If not, how about sending me a copy of the tape! I could transcribe it here.
“And CSL is supposed to be the creme de la creme of Christian 20th-century thought.”
No no. He isn’t. He’s supposed to be a skilled popularizer and recruiter, but that’s all.
I’ll see if I’ve got the transcript somewhere. It was all along time ago now – four, maybe five years? – so it’s probably long gone. But I’ll look.
I remember – years ago – taking a graduate seminar led by Eileen Barker on the sociology of religion at the LSE. And she told this story about one of her research students.
He was an atheist doing some kind of observational study of a fundamentalist Christian group. Apparently he became properly aware of the power of religious language and ritual when he found himself pursuing some guy down the street who didn’t want to take his Christian literature convinced that the person was going to burn eternally in hell.
(I think at that point he decided that perhaps he needed to take a step back!)
Even more than five. The date on the acks is August 2001, and clearly the interview itself was well before that. Cool about transcript.
Yeh, I can imagine that happening to me all too easily, just as I can with Riefenstahl type stuff, and with the Milgram experiment.
Oh and Merlijn – I know, about that song in the movie of ‘Cabaret.’ I think it has that effect on lots of people – as it was meant to. It’s very skillfully done. I gather the new stage version in London has carefully reproduced the same scary effect with the same scene. Well – music is like that. Dionysus; Altamont; Folk Life; We Shall Overcome; Springsteen and the Seeger sessions; etc etc. Be careful what you wish for, I mean sing.
Instrumentalism in religion seems inadequate to me. As soon as you know it’s all made up the effect is gone. What is the point of praying for the salvation of oneself or others if there’s nothing there to do the saving? What is the point of telling unbelievers they’re going to hell if you know they’re not? And if you’re seduced by ritual then you’ve ceased to have an instrumental belief and you’ve come to have a belief that your religion is absolutely true. Instrumental belief only works with humbler things like law, money or the game of twister. Knowing that these things are human inventions doesn’t invalidate their purposes.
I may have missed something, but in what way does Instrumentalism differ from a placebo?
“Or maybe I talked about soccer crowds or something.”
– Like how to keep these vast, heaving groups of fscist thugs under control with tasers, whips and attack dogs?
“Instrumentality” is a word much used by the RC church I beleive. I came across it because it was much used by the late Cordwainer Smith (P. M. A Linebarger) in his amazing SF stories of the “instrumentality of man” ….
“He was an atheist doing some kind of observational study of a fundamentalist Christian group. Apparently he became properly aware of the power of religious language and ritual when he found himself pursuing some guy down the street who didn’t want to take his Christian literature convinced that the person was going to burn eternally in hell.”
Yeah that’s really scary – reminds me of the stories of the communist thugs who were beaten up by the Nazi thugs in pre-1933 Berlin, whi then became ultra-enthusiastic Nazis.
And again, what IS this “Non-Realist” tradition.
How can one be a non-realist, unless you are off your head?
Will someone please, please explain?
Oh, it seems to me to be quite possible to be a non-realist about more abstract scientific and philosophical propositions without being off one’s head or believing one’s coffee may one morning be pouring up, rather than down. Aside from very basic commonsense knowledge, I could believe that all large-scale scientific theories about the world (classical relavistictic physics, quantum, etc.), mind-matter theories (physicalism, dualism etc.) and ideas about ultimates (theism, deism, “strong” atheism) are shaped and framed by human subjects to such a degree that their “truth” becomes a non-question. Mind you, I don’t do so, and I think all kinds of relativism and non-realism have a tendency to assert *some* absolute truths and thereby become inconsistent – but the idea is not in and of itself crazy.
Merlijn has demonstrated that he does not understand science, as she is done.
All the scientific, as opposed to metaphysical theories that he mentions are (excuse me) TESTABLE , including the mind-matter ones he mentions, which is why they are becoming increasingly marginalised, as knowledge increases.
ANd because they are tested, and re-tested, and put to practical applications – the CD drive and reader that we all have in our computers is a quantum mechanical device, as is the laser that reads/writes it, they are very much part of reality, and not non-realist.
WAKE UP – you’re dreaming!
This is why I suspect that “string” theory is going to go belly-up, for instance. There is just too much hand-waving going on.
If you believe that science somehow refutes relativism and antirealism, or that the practical benefits of scientific research do so, it is you who doesn’t understand science. Dawkins’ famous quip “show me a relativist at 15,000 feet, and I’ll show you a hypocrite” charged relativists with inconsistency, but did not refute relativism as such (and I don’t think he intended to).
Which does not mean relativism and non-realism cannot be refuted. Just that there is a difference between scientific falsifiability and philosophical refutability. With the latter being always less final and definitive than the former.
BTW, Orff’s music is not in the same category as the Horst-Wessel-Lied, any more than Wagner’s is, even though some Nazis liked both.
Grrrrr ….
Complete bl**dy Cobblers!
Of course Dawkins’ quip about relatavists at xthousand feet refutes and demolishes relativism.
This is Johnson and Bish Berkely AGAIN.
If it has been scientifically falsified it is dead – you just have to drag the corpse out.
The fact that the message hasn’t reached the secondary nerve ganglia of the relativists, doesn’t mean their model isn’t toatly dead, along with some of their “higher” brain-functions.
I should know, as I publicly humiliated one of these idiots, in just this manner, about 15 years back in a teacher training college – he looked as if he’d been hit in the face.
Allright, then.
Bishop Merlijn: The belief that the stone at your feet is a part of the real world, that it exists independently of your impressions of that stone, is scientifically untestable. It is a basic belief. I could argue that all that is ‘real’ *are* your sensory impressions of the stone, and there is no way you could *scientifically* refute that statement.
G. Tingey (kicks the stone triumphantly): I refute it thus!
Bishop Merlijn: Not at all. All you have done is engaged in a new series of sensory experiences: a tactile experience of your foot hitting a stone, a visual one of the stone moving a little – but you have in no way proven that these experiences in any way refer to a ‘real’ stone in a ‘real’ world, much less reliably so. You may well assume that this is the case – but you cannot scientifically prove it.
Johnson was wrong, GT. You can’t refute it ‘thus’. Johnson missed the point.
You don’t know you’re not a brain in a vat. You can’t.
I think Merlijn and GT may be illustrating the two main categories of philosopher, and therefore their parallel lines will never meet. GT represents the “I wonder what the answer to this question is” school, while Merlijn represents the school that sees a problem more like music that gives philosopher the opportunity to do the philosophy dance. This allows them both to be right, just as 9.999999 and 10 are the same answer if you stand back far enough.
Had Johnson picked up the rock and hurled it at the bishop, he would still not have refuted relativism, but he would have caused the bishop to urgently reconsider its value in practical applications.
‘…he looked as if he’d been hit in the face.’ Do you see that look a lot? You may be misinterpreting it.
Ken,
‘just as 9.999999 and 10 are the same answer if you stand back far enough.’
If you stand back fr enough it could be the difference between succesfully re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and plunging into the heart of the sun. ;)
“‘…he looked as if he’d been hit in the face.’ Do you see that look a lot? You may be misinterpreting it.”
laughing until breath quite quite gone…
And the pragmatist would say: “if you want to avoid bruised toes, don’t go around kicking stones. That’s enough ‘reality’ for me.”
That’s more or less the solution to this philosophical conundrum (if it has one), as far as I’m concerned.
Remember William James and the squirrel on the tree? Brilliant, says I.
Going back to rituals and whether theological types subscribe to religion as a fiction – do a serious number of them claim they do? Seems like a pose to me.
Rituals can be effective and completely non-religious. They are an implementation of the ‘Committment and Consistency’ trigger (Cialdini) in our minds, and I am sure that a majority of atheists who participated repeatedly in religious rituals would find it far easier to move to a theistic position. And their participation even in a cynical ‘fictional’ mindset, provides a ‘social proof’ trigger to others that supports their religious belief.
Merlijn is saying that the whole of modern science and technology is false, and built on sand, because we cannot “know” that is real and verifyable.
We all know that that is a load of foetid Dingoe’s kidneys.
I’m told that killing a solipsist is difficult, but I just do not believe this b*llsh*t.
GT, you should try exploring the intellectual roots of the word ’empiricism’, it might help.
*sigh* The existence of phenomenological properties represented in experience by the senses is consistent with realism, non-realism, solipsism, etc. And in the end, all inquiry into the natural world is based on sensory experience. It is simply not possible to ‘step outside ourselves’ and see how things really are in the real world. Does this mean the whole of scientific inquiry is built on sand? I don’t think so, as I believe there are good reasons to assume realism. I just don’t think that realism can be proved by the methods of science.
(I recall being a solipsist at the age of three. I was thinking of whether the cat and my parents and all also had these inner worlds ‘behind their eyes’, or not. I couldn’t quite convince myself that they did, but eventually decided just to assume so. It was for the best of the cat, in particular, that I did not try to experimentally verify my position)
Yes, I’m quite aware that the whole of science is pragmatically empiricist.
So what?
Science is also realist and non-mystical (i.e. the “supernatural” is ruled out.)
Given that, since we started doing science properly, there have been NO supernatural manifestations, and peole HAVE been looking, one suapects that science is onto something (what a surprise!)
IT WORKS.
It works better than ANYTHING else that has been tried, ever. If only by showing that certain avenues of explanation are plain wrong, and useless.
What I want to know is why people will insist on pursuing lines of inquiry and thought which we already know are fruitless.
Phlogiston anyone?
I agree that realism/empiricism is an assumption (or should that be an axiom) in science, but, if it is wrong, you must (since this is a philosophical enquiry, put up a model which is at least as valid.
And there isn’t one.
So, you agree now that realism is an assumption. I agree with you that it is a very good assumption: and that whatever we can know about the stone (colour, weight, hardness, chemical composition, etc.) indicates some very real-world properties of the stone. The success of science at least is not inconsistent with an assumption of realism.
This said, I don’t think the success of science can be taken to *refute* relativism or antirealism. We could still be brains in a vat. The consistent, regular, knowable world could all be part of the illusion concocted by whoever is keeping us there.
I think you overestimate the capabilities of science to deal with the supernatural. All that we can scientifically do is establish a correlation between events, as supernatural causation is impossible within the scientific method. We might establish that there is a correlation between prayer and healing, etc. And some (Jessica Utts for example) do believe that science has established some weak but statistically significant correlations for some possibly paranormal phenomena (precognition etc.)
I lack the expertise to evaluate this, but I would argue that if the correlation is valid, it might as well be pointing to some kind of eccentric but quite natural mechanism, rather than something full-blown supernatural such as angels or deities.
Which is the point: as far as science goes, it stops at the observation. Saying: “something supernatural does this” is in principally not scientifically valid. It has to say: “This phenomenon is for the time being unexplained” and go on with its business.
“And some (Jessica Utts for example) do believe that science has established some weak but statistically significant correlations for some possibly paranormal phenomena (precognition etc.)”
Ooh, Jerry S believes that too, on account of he’s one of those significant correlations about precognition. He can precognit, at least so he says. (Of course we can’t be sure he’s not just telling whoppers, but that naturally has no bearing on his belief, even if it has lots on ours.)
I can’t precognit or presense and thank God for that (I’ve a serious case of hypochondria, and if it’s not diseases – and I kinda went through all of them – it’s something else. If I started believing that my usual sense of impending doom might actually be indicative of something real, I’d probably go totally off the deep end).