Persistence and tenacity
A little more on this question of ‘faith’ and cognitive disability – in hopes of provoking more foolish outbursts from angry Christian commenters. No not really; in hopes of exploring the issue further.
There’s a basic and important difference between ‘faith’ and inquiry. Their goals are different. The goal of faith is faith. The goal is confirmation, continuation, stability, loyalty. It’s Queen Elizabeth’s motto: semper eadem: always the same. It’s continuity. The goal is to have faith and go on having faith and go on going on having faith. It’s sameness, tenacity, clinging, stubbornness, persistence. The virtue is in resisting doubt. In inquiry, understanding, knowledge-seeking, research – science – that’s not the goal. There the goal is to get it right, not to hang on no matter what. The goal is different, the attitudes are, the virtues are, the habits are, the methods are, the whole way of thinking is.
It’s a radical difference.
In most situations, we recognize and understand that the first is wrong and stupid, bad and dangerous, even lethal, while the second is right. If you’re looking for food or water or shelter, it’s not virtue to decide it’s in place X and then hang on to that no matter what the evidence. But with ‘faith’ it is a virtue.
It’s a radical difference and a large one.
I saw the film Happy Feet yesterday. It makes exactly the same points you do about faith versus rational enquiry, but through the medium of dance, talking penguins and all the pop songs you can remember.
I thought I’d start off the strand with something amusing. Now let the angry Christian commentary commence! ;-)
Very similar points are made by C.S. Peirce in “The Fixation of Belief” (1877). There are four ways to settle belief about something: tenaciously clinging to whatever you already believe; believing what authorities and institutions tell you to believe; believing what you would like to think is true; scientific inquiry. Only the last involves an interaction between the believer and reality.
Whats to get angry about? Looks right to me.
The only thing is, I am just up to ‘cogito’ in Why Truth Matters, and I rather thought you hit something important with the advantage of faith being that you can let Authority deal with certain grounding issues, and just get on with your life.
So it seems good, and cost-effective, to me that most people can ignore these questions for large slabs of time. It may be that the resistance to atheism ( often seen in a hostile light) as opposed to ‘separated church and state’ (often seen as a positive secular ideal government) is that the two terms encapsulate wildly different sets of costs and benefits for the hearer.
Nothin’ to get angry about, but I was expecting the explosion from a different quarter.
True, about the Authority thing. It does have some advantages. But I tend to think of it as a devil’s bargain.
Angelo is right about the Peirce reference; I was about to make the same one. And Peirce mentions that the authority method has its advantages.
The only problem, of course, is that you can go for centuries getting on with your life, and your descendents getting on with their lives, but being way off from knowing what’s true. And to some people it matters what’s true, though perhaps to most of the human race it doesn’t so much. Mental comfort is much more important to them.
And then, of course, the smart alecks reply, “But you science lovers haven’t the slightest idea how close to the truth you are, either. What if warp drives and all that Star Trek stuff that we think is fantasy, and even wilder things, will one day be found out to be true?” To which we reply, “But unless we do real inquiry, and teach our descendents how to do it, we’ll never know whether warp drives are possible. You think God will reveal that stuff to us?”
JonJ, why not phrase it as ‘some might raise the objection that’ rather than hypothesising both the ‘smart alecs’ and their reply? It seems a common tactic in internet discussions of this kind to eg label the opponent racist or whatever, then invent their racist commentary, then respond to that so-sophisticated strawman argument.
OK I will bite.
What is the evidence of religious belief being a cognitive disability? Is it like the evidence that homosexuality was a mental disease as catalogued until a very few years ago?
Like the ability to knit, proactive skepticism is probably a learned pattern that is not supplied with the basic software but a potential use for it. How is having not been trained in something a ‘disability’?
Faith is, among other things, but principally:
Belief without evidence, or without obvious evidence …..
Ther are times, I hate to admit, that “faith” can be useful – if you don’t have enough evidence.
Things like “hunches” for instance.
Or evidence you don’t realise you’ve got.
The latter, of course is the most likely explanation for many forms of ESP/supernatural/occult “experiences”.
People have been recieving information, usualyy subconciously, or have not been integrating that information – then BLAM! And it seems like magic. It isn’t but it has taken a long time for the realisation of these things to sink in.
This is where genuine experimental psychology has really made a difference to our understanding.
It is also why “faith” in the other, religious sense, is hopefully in a long-term decline (see the “Optimism” post recently… )
Because we do know a lot more than we used to, and that body of knowledege is growing, forcing the god of the gaps backwards, ever backwards.
Which is why the fundamentalist loonies, of any stripe are screaming so loudly.
Soryy if this seems a little rambling, but I hope I’ve made a useful point?
“I tend to think of it as a devil’s bargain.”
It’s not just a devil’s bargain. I think Dennett in “Breaking the Spell” points out that to abdicate moral authority (as in, letting someone else do all that thinking for you) just won’t wash, because the act of abdication (which is not passive) is itself an actively immoral act. And it’s not enough to say you don’t mind, you’d rather not have free will anyway, thank you, because it isn’t just you that bears consequences. Long term and maybe even short term, completely innocent third parties may suffer or die because you made the decision that someone outside of yourself gets to decide what is right and what is wrong for you. If it’s responsibility one is seeking to evade, it doesn’t work like that.
A friend of mine recently had a baby and mentioned sadly that he had been diagnosed with a small hole in his heart. As the baby was several weeks premature, I told him not to worry, because these things usually healed themselves.
Yesterday I received an e-mail headed A MIRACLE!! saying that the hole had disappeared and thanking everybody for their prayers.
Aaarrrggghhh!!!
“I think Dennett in “Breaking the Spell” points out that to abdicate moral authority (as in, letting someone else do all that thinking for you) just won’t wash, because the act of abdication (which is not passive) is itself an actively immoral act. “
But religious belief for most people (at least most people that I have met who are eligious believers as ar as I can judge the issue) entails no such abdication. Believing that there is an all-powerful god who commands you to be good and that it is your duty to obey does not, in itself, absolve you from real engageemnt with moral dilemmas. All it does is ensure that you believe there ARE moral dilemmas and they are top be taken seriously.
Far from being an alleviation of responibility, it seems to me that religious believers (those of my acquaintance anyway) see their belief as an entrenchement of responsibility. They consider the moral content of their acts, public or private, to have cosmic significance rather than merely local, historical effects. Like all of us they will consider the advice of human authorities as they agonise over moral questions but they are aware that all huiman authority in moral questions is, well, questionable. They are no different from us atheists in that. The ‘higher authority’ they do accept is notoriously difficult to access in unambiguous terms. For all practical purposes it is no diferent for religious believers to say that they must ‘obey their god’ than it is for us to say we must ‘obey our consciences’. Thee only difference, practically, it seems to me, is that we atheists are more likely to believe that conscience is a kind of lifestyle extra, more or less significant depending on your circumstances, rather than anything that MUST be obeyed.
It may be that there are some kinds of religious believers who simply abdicate all moral authority to others but I have ver met any. They would, presumably, be something like the traditional zombies (without the brain eating) unable to act without command. They’s be a bit like shells of men who had been stuffed full of straw, I suppose.
Chris – why don’t you tell them you prayed for us to win the Ashes that week ?
John M,
point taken – but – and Dennett does follow through on this, they believe maybe sincerely enough, but on the basis of what? How many of them have heard god speaking to them directly and how many believe it because someone claiming to be speaking for god has told them? Their decision of abdication can perhaps be also described as accepting authority without evidence. I’m suddenly, surprisingly, reminded of that string of incidents somewhere in the States a couple of years ago at fast food joints, where someone posing as law enforcement and equipped with plausible-sounding emergency explanations would phone the manager and direct him to strip search certain people – with highly embarrassing consequences. So you have very sincere believers taking literally explicit instructions to behave negatively to certain individuals or groups on the strength of commands filtered through someone, purportedly from a third party whose existence is, to put it mildly, in doubt. Is that anyone’s idea of good enough? The massive blind spot so many believers seem to have, which indicates Dawkins was onto something when he pointed out the religion meme’s great defenses, is expressed in the circular argument that could go something like “god told me not to read books claiming to demonstrate that he probably doesn’t exist.” It so often really does boil down to something like that and the sufferers seem not to be able to spot a single flaw in the argument.
“A little more on this question of ‘faith’ and cognitive disability – in hopes of provoking more foolish outbursts from angry Christian commenters .. “
Well, not in Scotland — at this writing they’re too busy praying for alcohol-abusers:
Scottish Churches to Pray for Teenage Buckfast Drinkers
Churches in the Airdrie and Coatbridge area of Scotland are to use prayer to fight back against antisocial behaviour among youngsters in the area, which they attribute to the popular teenage tipple Buckfast…
href=”http://www.christiantoday.com/article/scottish.churches.to.pray.for.teenage.buckfast.drinkers/8981.htm” target=”new”>See ‘Christian Today’ for details
Just an excuse to go off topic. TGIF
Those darn links.
Try again.
“why not phrase it as ‘some might raise the objection that'”
Tiresome weasel words like this are what make so many discussions on the Internet so excruciating to read. It fosters the spread of Wikiality. We know that this kind of objection is common as dirt so why not just come out and say it.
“What is the evidence of religious belief being a cognitive disability?”
You’re making the same mistake Jeffrey Mushens made. That’s not what I said. I didn’t say ‘religious belief’ is a cognitive disability. In the post on ‘Handicapping’ I talked about ‘religious indoctrination’ and ‘dogmatic articles of faith’ and ‘dogma’. I chose those particular words and phrases on purpose, not by accident. There’s a reason I didn’t say ‘religious belief’ is a cognitive disability; the reason is that that’s not what I’m suggesting. I don’t think mere belief is a cognitive disability; it’s the extra ingredient that I think makes it one, if it’s taught to young children before their brains are developed and before they’ve had a chance to form other habits. I think the extra ingredient makes it one because it places religious belief beyond questioning – that’s what indoctrination and dogmatic and dogma mean, and that’s why I used those limiting words – and that’s the way of thinking that (I’m suggesting) makes it hard to form the basic background awareness that all beliefs are subject to questioning.
That’s two for two. Two replies from theists, and both have misquoted me, both omitted the limiting words which were the whole point of the exercise.
“The ‘higher authority’ they do accept is notoriously difficult to access in unambiguous terms. For all practical purposes it is no diferent for religious believers to say that they must ‘obey their god’ than it is for us to say we must ‘obey our consciences’.”
Sorry, but that’s nonsense, and a whitewash. You keep adding “(those of my acquaintance anyway)” – although you forgot to with that statement, and you needed it – but guess what, not all religious believers are like that. To put it mildly. Lots of them would flatly reject your assertion that “the ‘higher authority’ they do accept is notoriously difficult to access in unambiguous terms” – on the contrary, they would say they know exactly what the higher authority wants them to do, which is why it’s sheer whitewash to pretend there’s no difference between obeying their god and an atheist obeying her conscience.
I get really sick of this compulsion to pretend that religious people are more reasonable than they in fact are. It’s splendid that some of them are, and nice for you that all the ones you know are, but it doesn’t follow that all of them are. Peruse a newspaper or two for some evidence on this point.
>Peruse a newspaper or two for some evidence on this point.< I suspect the ordinary everyday Christian religious believer typical of the UK doesn’t get cited too often in newspapers.
But I nowhere specified Christian religious believer. Nor did I specify the UK; the good newspapers (perhaps I should have specified good newspapers – I wasn’t thinking of the Sun!) have international coverage.
Is anyone assuming this discussion is confined to the UK? That would be an odd assumption. Hi, let me introduce myself; I edit and content-provide this outfit, and I’m a Murkan.
>Is anyone assuming this discussion is confined to the UK? That would be an odd assumption. Hi, let me introduce myself; I edit and content-provide this outfit, and I’m a Murkan.< Yeah, but you’re a small minority on this outfit. Anyway, I’ve never been to Murkistan, so I admit ignorance of that place even greater than for the mid-West of the States.
Am not either a small minority on outfit! Am outfit itself!
I’ve merely passed through Murkistan myself, but I get reports.
Krakauer’s book on Mormon Fundamentalists (not to be confused with Mormons) is recurrently surprising on just how dogmatic and immovable beliefs can be. And what large numbers of people can operate that way. Most of Utah for a start.
I don’t think it’s just my impression that a comfortable majority of posters on N&C theads are UK based, and I’ve wondered why (assuming it is the case). Perhaps it’s self-perpetuating, in that patrons of N&C send Ophelia articles they think she may post on B&W, and UK based people natch send UK newspaper articles, which interest UK readers, and so on. Of course that doesn’t explain why a preponderance of UK posters became entrenched, but the question of origins is always tricky. -:)
No, I think you’re right about commenters, Allen; I’ve wondered why too. It may be just as simple as the fact that I post a lot more links from UK media than from US ones, which is mostly just because of less clutter and faster loading. Or it may be that plus the fact that it’s on UK time (which is just an artefact of the way JS programmed it more than four years ago).
But it’s also true that commenters are a very small fraction of readers, so who knows if the pattern holds. Maybe there’s something in Weetabix that causes people to comment here but has no effect on who reads it.
>But it’s also true that commenters are a very small fraction of readers…< Is that really so in relation to readers of N&C? I tended to assume that people who visited B&W for the most part didn’t know what went on behind the scenes, and that we readers (and commentators) on N&C were a small elite. I always wanted to be part of an elite group, and thought I’d at last achieved my ambition.
Heh. Oh yes, that’s so. Sorry, but there are lots more readers even of N&C than there are commenters.
But never mind, readers of B&W are an elite group by definition, surely!
“(I’m comparing intellectuals with intellectuals of course, not Southern Baptists with rank and file communists).”
But why? That seems to be what practically everyone does when defending religion, but why? Why can’t the dratted Southern Baptists simply be the subject matter? It’s not as if they’re either few or powerless right now.
Anyway in this particular comment the answer to “Do you mean ‘religious faith’ or ‘faith in anything’?” is ‘religious faith’.
All this stuff about how easy theodicy is to refute in a couple of sentences – all very well, but it doesn’t go away, it keeps coming back to say more stupid things and interfere in more legislation, education, scientific research.
Having said that, however…I did also have it in mind that ‘faith’ refers to other kinds of loyalty and persistence, not all of which are malign – but some of which are. Faith in people even in the absence of evidence can be a splendid thing – or disastrous; it depends. Faith in the potential of people can be highly useful even if it’s not based on much. Faith in the infallibility of Marx or Uncle Joe or Dr Freud or the Prophet is usually a terrible idea. It varies.
Cathal wrote;
>Think of all those ‘political pilgrims’ – often the best and the brightest of their generation – who defended the Soviet Union from its inception right into the 70s or 80s of the last century. Many of them were leading scientists (such as Einstein himself, a devoted fellow-traveller).< David Caute wrote a book on this, and later there was a more comprehensive one by Paul Hollander: “Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society”. Amazing stuff. One of my (many) favourites was George Bernard Shaw, after he’d been taken on a tour of a Soviet prison just outside Moscow, reporting that the conditions inside were so good that the prisoners told him they wouldn’t want to leave once their sentence was completed. In the case of some of the fellow-travellers, when disillusionment set in after the ‘revelations’ about Stalin’s rule following the Kruschev speech in 1956, they promptly transferred their allegiance to the glories of Mao’s China. There were certainly scientists who fell for the myth of the Soviet Union, one being not a fellow traveller, but a fully paid-up supporter, J.D. Bernal, who, as I recall, described Stalin as the world’s greatest scientist. But it is not the case that Einstein was a fellow traveller. I checked out one or two books, and here is what he wrote in 1932 about the situation in the USSR: “At the top there appears to be a personal struggle in which the foulest means are used…. At the bottom there seems to be complete suppression of individual and of freedom of speech. One wonders what life is worth under such conditions…” So although I think he could be naive about political realities on occasion (I recall one statement he made immediately post-WW2 in which he appeared to suggest that if the British would leave Palestine, the Jews and Arabs would come to a modus vivendi between themselves), he had few illusions about the Soviet Union.
Allen,
Thanks for the clarification — I used the term ‘fellow traveller’ a bit loosely. I forget where I picked up the idea — and a quick check shows there’s no mention at all of Einstein in the index to Hollander’s PP, which for some reason I IMAGINED was my source.
False memory syndrome hits again ….
Cathal: You may have recalled something of Einstein’s activities post-WW2. My recollection is that he was liable to be taken in by the highly plausible “peace movement” organisations that were actually Communist front organisations (or close to it). That, of course, does not excuse the FBI regarding him as a dangerous Commie. (I recall he had a l-o-n-g FBI file.)
I’d like to see Hollander’s superbly researched book again (some of the antics of the fellow-travellers are a joy to read), so I may order it through my local library. If so, I’ll check up if he has anything on Einstein.
Ooops! Just checked back and seen you said Einstein’s not in the index.
“some of the antics of the fellow-travellers are a joy to read”
I was really fascinated by those in my yoof. Especially the agility with which people adapted to the CP’s changes of direction – from the orthodox anti-capitalist phase to the Popular Front to the Nazi-Soviet Pact to Hitler’s invasion – Whoops! Whoops! Whoops!
That was years ago (that I was enthralled). I’ve been fascinated by various kinds of groupthink and woolliness all my adult life, it now occurs to me. What an odd hobby.
As a non-UK, non-Murkan reader, I’m confused. Aren’t the inhabitants of Murkistan Murkistanis? What’s the relationship between them and the Murkans?
Murkistanis are known colloquially as “Murkans”. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.
All this talk about reasonable Christians is splendid but just look again at the terrifying articles that Ophelia has linked to about the Xtian military infiltration.
“[McCollough] says Christian Embassy will not give explicit policy advice, but as a counselor, he would tell a member of Congress or a military official that a particular position — pro-choice politics, or pacifism, for instance — is “contrary to scripture.”
So pacifism is contrary to scripture!!! That explains a lot about US policy…
erm, could we actually talk about faith and beleif and reason, please?
And what actions one should take with, or without sufficient evidence to support a particular action.
The discussion seems to have strayed a bit.