Self and deity
I read a bit of Julian’s Atheism: a Very Short Guide earlier today and there was a bit I wondered about. It gave me pause. He’s comparing belief in God with belief in the existence of the self – one’s own, that is.
For many religious believers, their belief in God’s existence is of comparable strength. They feel the truth of God’s existence so strongly that they can no more doubt it than they can doubt the existence of their own selves.
Is that true? I wondered. I don’t know that it’s not – but I wonder. It seems implausible. It seems implausible because (as we all know via Descartes, of course, if not in any other way) it’s not the same kind of belief or truth-feeling or inability to doubt. We can’t (I think) even imagine not believing we ourselves exist. We can imagine believing we’re in the clutches of the evil demon, in the matrix, all that, but we can’t imagine believing we don’t exist, because if we did we would immediately wonder (unless we’re very absent-minded) who that is doing the believing then. But no other belief can have that kind of strength, or force, because no other belief has that trick up its sleeve. Unless of course I’m just wrong. I’m curious about it. I could ask Julian, but I don’t think he has time for my footling questions.
His point is interesting, and no doubt right: that arguments are beside the point for most religious believers because arguments aren’t why they believe in god to begin with. I’m sure he’s right about strong belief – but I wonder if it can be as strong as belief in the existence of one’s own self.
I suppose for people who believe in an immanent god it could. You just believe your self and god (and all selves) are the same thing – so you need to believe in just the one. I don’t think that’s really what Julian meant though, since he wasn’t talking about mysticism and inner experience and so on. But maybe it is what he meant all the same. Anyway it’s given me an interesting puzzle.
Good book, by the way.
Hmmmm… I agree. Belief in the existence of the self does not seem to be even belief to me (which would include at least the conceivability of the contrary). I know that I exist, with more certainty than anything else.
I don’t think even an immanent Deity (which I believe in) would be comparable in this regard. Even an immanent Deity includes a view on the universe besides ourselves. I can conceive of such a Deity not existing and yet myself as well as everything else continuing to exist.
“that arguments are beside the point for most religious believers because arguments aren’t why they believe in god to begin with.”
I wonder if that’s true. I love my boyfriend not because of some arguments that it would make sense for me to do so, yet you could use arguments to make me fall out of love with him – for example, if he cheated one me or belittled me, you could convince me that it’s really not in my best interest to be in love with him.
Is that true? I wondered. I don’t know that it’s not – but I wonder. It seems implausible.
Yes, it is true. Go and ask any really committed religious believer and, if pressed long enough and hard enough, they will eventually say that arguments and evidence are not ultimately important, and that they just have faith in God and it is all that matters to them. The Enlightenment, higher criticism, and modern science have chipped away at the things that believers accept about God, but they cannot change committed believers’ faith in God. Their belief is not susceptible to criticism or counter-evidence.
By they way, Baggini’s book on atheism is the best I’ve read (much better than Dawkin’s book, which I found okay). Especially important was this bit from the conclusion of a section entitled, “Against Religion?”( pg 106-7):
A great atheist read is Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, yet felt that if Russell intended the book to speak to Christians, he had entirely failed. In this chapter [Against Religion?] I hope I have explained why. One can make a strong case against religious belief and one can show how the traditional arguments for religious belief are hollow. One can even explain how belief often rests on personal convictions which are unreliable sources of knowledge. But the problem with using arguments to persuade others to become atheists is that believers often do not even accept their founding assumptions. They are starting from somewhere else. The atheist may begin with the basic laws of logic, such as the principle that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. But the believer often begins with a conviction that God exists that is even stronger than the logician’s belief in their first principles. This belief trumps all reason.
The best we [atheists] can do therefore is to show believers who may think that they have rational grounds for their belief that they are wrong. We can force them to choose, in other words, between taking the risk of faith and restricting their use of reason to apologetics, or giving up on religious belief altogether. I think that relatively few will take the second path. But as more do, and religious convictions become less and less likely to be passed on by parents, educators, and the Church, so the force of reason may generally hold more sway. Religion will recede not by atheists shouting condemnation, but by the quiet voice of reason slowly making itself heard.
Truer words were never written.
Wait, this doesn’t make any sense at all. Not a damn bit.
If religious convictions are impervious to the direct application of reason because they are “felt” on an emotional level, then an appeal to emotion should be the most effective strategy.
Make them feel really stupid for believing, make them feel like everyone is laughing at them for being so stupid, and deny them the reassuring sense of a similarly believing support structure by attacking it as ignorant and worthless, and most of them should crumble.
Not saying that would be polite, or a morally acceptable tactic, but it does seem to be the conclusion this argument actually supports. Not some gentle persuasion.
If the issue is emotional, address it on an emotional level.
Both Patrick & hardindr are correct.
It doesn’t make any sense at all.
And, yes they really do believe it.
You only have to look at history, or people like Ian Paisley or the muslim mass murderers, who are doing what they do because their personal delusion of “god” tells them to.
The ultimate example of this must be Mahmoud, of course … or the caliph who decided HE was god, and founded the Druze sect ….
agrrrr ……
I agree that Baggini’s book is very good and covers the ground briefly and clearly. His summary of the problem and the solution also seems correct to me – ‘No I don’t want to join your movement if you don’t mind and here’s why’ – but in these increasingly stupid times (Muslim medicine!!!) it’s hard to be that rational and calm. Which is where reading and/or listening to Dawkins comes in – it’s therapy.
Hmmm,
a lot of good thoughts to ponder here. Raymond M. Smullyan have another take in his brilliant piece : “Is God a Taoist?” http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
While primarily challinging common concepts of “sin”, he also offers insights into other relgious delusions.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Tea:
I wonder if that’s true. I love my boyfriend not because of some arguments that it would make sense for me to do so, yet you could use arguments to make me fall out of love with him – for example, if he cheated one me or belittled me, you could convince me that it’s really not in my best interest to be in love with him.
And perhaps you could pinpoint reasons why you fell in love with him in the first place – which in no way would explain the whole thing but would be nonetheless real.
I think the dichotomy Julian appears to draw between faith and reason is way too sharp. For some religious believers, belief in God may be built on some solid bedrock of faith alone – but I would wager that for most, it’s a mixture. Religious people lose their faith, rekindle their faith, waver and have doubts all the time. Reason and emotional attachments play a role in both.
And on the hypothesis that religious convictions ultimately stand and fall on the latter, Patrick does seem to be right in pointing out a contradiction in Julian’s reasoning. Supposing an atheist would want to battle religious convictions as such, the tactic would seem to be emotional attacks. By stating that atheist should chip away at religious beliefs by using reasoned argument, it already is tacitly assumed that such arguments may serve as a scaffolding which, if taken away or shown faulty, may lead to the collapse of the whole building. As a theist, I support broadly the same kind of tactic against atheist convictions, btw ;-)
Take an argument that OB raised some time ago. Which is broadly that from the eyes of an antelope about to be torn apart by a jaguar, or from the standpoint of some kid dying from cholera, it is pretty hard to imagine the universe as anything but indifferent to our personal fates and individual suffering. The existence of a good, caring, benevolent God seems falsified any time some little creature is denied the chance to live and make something of life.
As for the structure of the argument, the internal relations between the statements, it is reason, pure and simple. But as for the content – I think it is hard to grasp without sharing some of the horror and revulsion at the nastiness the universe seems to be filled with. Which is emotional. And that is, of course, not a criticism at all. A religionist who would reject the argument for that reason would sell his soul to the devil, so to speak (I don’t believe in the devil, to be sure).
In other words, I think there are emotional and moral commitments which transcend one’s commitment to one’s world-picture and commitment to reason (a commitment to truth being one of them).
But also, I think that reason alone is not sufficient for a religionist to accept atheism, or vice versa. But the reason for that does not lie in the religionist’s emotionalism versus the atheist’s reason or anything like that. They may contingently be there if we pit a very average religionist against a philosophically informed atheist. But not if we pit the best of the two worldviews against each other. I think the issue lies in the “openness” of philosophical problems – the fact that they cannot be satisfactorily solved by application of reason, or that a satisfactory conclusion does not compel a consensus of philosophical thinkers in the same way that a succesful scientific hypothesis compels the assent of scientists. I’ve mentioned this issue before. Bill Vallicella at maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com has some interesting recent posts about the issue.
True, there are many categories of religious believers: some have more of a rational component to their belief, one might say, than others. And for them, it is an effective tactic to force them to choose between their belief and their commitment to rationality.
But my observation is that relatively few believers can be rationally argued into becoming atheists. More often, what seems to happen is that they leave their families and childhood social environments, meet secular types in college, etc., and come to see that a secular life is in fact possible and preferable in many ways to what they knew up to then. Others are caught up in the problem of evil — either intellectually or because they confront extreme evil themselves, as in the Holoocaust, and become atheists for that reason.
There seem to be many ways to “lose one’s faith” — there is no sure-fire strategy for those who want to rid the world of religion. I’m coming more and more to the conclusion, though, that the “problem of evil” approach seems to be more effective than most others. It’s just darned hard to hold onto the idea that a perfectly good, omnipotent divine being is running things, though a lot of people do manage this very difficult feat, I’m afraid.
“I think the issue lies in the “openness” of philosophical problems – the fact that they cannot be satisfactorily solved by application of reason, or that a satisfactory conclusion does not compel a consensus of philosophical thinkers in the same way that a succesful scientific hypothesis compels the assent of scientists.”
So called ‘philosophical problems’ that cannot be solved by application of reason are mere phantasms. ”Of that which we cannot speak we must thereof remain silent”
As to consensus, my opinion is that there are a lot of very poor philosophers because it is in the nature of philosophy to respect almost any consistent position, no matter how unreasonable. Fortunately the same cannot be said of science.
“If the issue is emotional, address it on an emotional level.” Patrick
If you’re looking for the perfect gift, there’s nowt to beat Robert Ingersoll for both riveting reason and tugging at the heartstrings.
_
Right, reasoning doesn’t seem to work for most religious people. But think of Dawkins, Douglas Adams, my own father… they initially all came to believe in god not because they’ve heard some good arguments for his existence, but because they were simply brought up that way. Some of them might have even been scared into believing (if you don’t believe, you’ll go to hell!) – yet, it was *reason* and *arguments* that made them lose their faith in the end.
It therefore doesn’t seem impossible that you start believing something for emotional reasons, but stop believing that same thing for rational ones.
Tea,
But love is different – love comes after belief in the existence of the thing loved. Presumably it would take a bit more than argument to convince you your boyfriend didn’t exist? Julian’s talking about belief in the existence of God in that particular passage, not whether or not God is lovable or worth loving. I take the two to be separate questions.
hardindr,
Sure, I agree about impervious belief, but I wasn’t questioning that point, only the ‘comparable strength’ part – the statement that ‘they can no more doubt it than they can doubt the existence of their own selves.’
It’s right after the passage you quoted, I think – page 109, I think. Good stuff, I agree. (I shan’t tell Julian that though. He’s my boss; I need to keep him humble and uncertain.)
Oops, another cross-post – I was answering your first comment, Tea, not the latest one.
Regarding whether belief in the self is comparable in strength to belief in the existence of god, I wonder, too. However, it does not seem quite as obviously implausible to me as it apparently does to OB.
JB’s suggestion is at least partially empirical: “Many” religious believers either do, or they don’t, believe in the existence of god with the same strength as they believe in the existence of self. If they do, then “why” (or “how come”)they do and whether they “should” are legitimate, but different, questions.
“We” — OB and me, for two — may well find it difficult, or even impossible, to think how someone could believe in the existence of god with the same strength as we believe in the existence of self. But “we” — OB and me, for two — are not likely among the “many religious believers” cohort JB was referring to.
Jeff,
Yeah, true. And I thought of that, of course. And you may well be right: it may just be a brute fact that some people do believe the two things with the same strength. (That’s why I said I don’t know it’s not true – I realize I don’t, and can’t, and that it may be. I really don’t know.) But…then again it may not; and in any case, even if it is (and other minds being what they are, there’s no way to know in either direction – it’s a guess for all of us), it’s still worth thinking about, I think – it’s worth thinking about how that would work, for one thing. The mechanics of it interest me. How would it be possible to believe anything with the same force or strength as we are simply compelled to believe that we exist? My doubt about this isn’t specifically religious; it applies to any belief at all. I think Descartes was right that that’s the one thing we simply cannot not believe (unless, as Julian notes, we’re mentally ill).
But OB, haven’t you ever caught yourself believing that you don’t exist? Those strange distracted moments when it suddenly seems inconceivable that what is going on around you is being experienced by a real person, and not just projected on a screen? When with a jolt you can look at the face even of your beloved spouse and, just for a second, see them as if you’ve never seen them before, as if there is no ‘you’ of accumulated experience doing the seeing?
Or have I been at the toasted cheese again?
p.s. Dissolution of the Self in Godhead is surely a rather banal religious concept, anyway? Wacky, maybe, for a convinced materialist, but quite normal, on the scale of theistically-inspired ravings, to be Tingeyish for a second…
Of course, Sue Blackmore has argued in ‘The Meme Machine’ and elsewhere that the existence of the self, at least as we conventionally understand it, is every bit as much an illusion as the existence of God.
And in that sense, Baggini’s might be a better metaphor than we know.
Dave,
Oh, sure, I’ve caught myself wondering who the hell ‘I’ am, what is all this, etc – but that’s not the same thing as actually believing that one doesn’t exist. It’s clearer in the context, but Julian doesn’t mean doubts about the concept ‘self,’ he means doubts about one’s own existence. It’s easy to doubt the ‘one’ part but not to doubt the ‘existence’ part.
Patrick,
Same thing. Julian makes that clear. It’s perfectly possible to change one’s concept of the self, but not to doubt one’s own existence. (Actually I wonder if the word ‘self’ is a little misleading in that last sentence I quoted – I think he’s using it reflexively, but it reads as if perhaps it refers to the concept. That is – saying ‘I doubt myself’ is different from saying ‘I doubt my Self.’ The phrase ‘doubt the existence of their own selves’ means just ‘doubt their own existence,’ and I think that’s reflexive, as in ‘I hurt myself.’ He might have been better off saying ‘doubt their own existence.’)
Unless I misunderstood that passage. But I don’t think I did – I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant.
Then again…
I suppose you can doubt your own existence, in those weird moments of dissociation. But I think not for long. You can have flashes of that, like vertigo, but they’re flashes – I think they can’t last longer than that because of the contradiction, which (JB says) sane people can’t not be aware of: if you’re thinking ‘I don’t exist’ or ‘it’s all unreal’ or anything at all, you exist to think it. I think it’s impossible to hold that thought off for long. Unless something is broken.
Mind you, I could be wrong about that…
helloooooooooooooooooooooooooooo?
I recall having a panic attack some months ago in which, for a protracted moment, my whole sense of “self” – my idea of being in a certain place at a certain time, and my awareness of having that idea was totally lost. I guess I experienced some kind of depersonalization/derealization. Scared the hell out of me.
But I agree with OB – we can doubt our own existence in flashes, or play around with the idea without really believing in it, but not actually believe in our own non-existence for a longer period of time, as the idea is obviously self-refuting.
Well, there have been quite a few philosophical objections to Descartes’ cogito over the years. Might be worth looking into. (And I won’t even get into the Buddhist concept of no-self.)
But these are not really contradictory to what I think was OB’s original point, that we have — in our non-philosophical, non-Buddhist moments, anyway — a conviction that we ourselves exist that it is hard for us non-theists to imagine theists having about their gods with the same strength. But they do often say that their religious convictions are that strong; perhaps they are exaggerating for effect
“there have been quite a few philosophical objections to Descartes’ cogito over the years.”
But are they objections to the cogito itself, or to the conclusions he draws from it? I think they’re to the latter. I could be dead wrong though. Cf references to ignorance passim.
“or play around with the idea without really believing in it”
Yeah. We can think about it, imagine believing it, try to believe it, all sorts of things, but if we’re sane, we can’t actually sustainedly believe it – at least that’s my guess.
About the panic attack. Very odd, but I had one in the middle of the night last night. Not like yours – a weird panic horror at being trapped in my own head. A very strange kind of aghast oh no, help help, I’m stuck in here and I’ll never be able to think any other kinds of thoughts, aaah, the horror. It wasn’t like the waking thought that we can never know what it’s like to be anyone else, or a bat; that our own mind is the only one we’ll ever know; it was much more like being buried alive or trapped. Clearly I wasn’t fully awake. And it only lasted a couple of seconds, and I turned over and went back to sleep, which I wouldn’t have if it had really scared me (because I wake myself up very easily). But for those two seconds or so it was intense – and weird – and weirdly repulsive. Sort of as if I were literally imprisoned inside my head, I guess.
It’s all the more odd, I should add, because in reality the inside of my head is such a lovely place. All daffodils and butterflies and snowflakes and soft fluffy clouds. Not horrible at all.
Presumably this panic attack and concern about the contents of your head is because you were the subject of an alien abduction and they have planted a device in your brain.
I recommend an x-ray just to be sure…
But if I get an X-ray that will interfere with transmission; I’d better not…
Actually, it belatedly occurred to me – well after I typed the account – that the proportion of dream to waking may have been higher than I realized. I half woke at some point, but the panic thing itself may have been mostly dream – or maybe all dream, maybe that’s what half woke me. It certainly was more like a dream than like waking thought.
It’s that dam’ toasted cheese again… Hope you had a more tranquil night…
No, it was the port mixed with brandy.
Yes thanks; peaceful as a flowery meadow. That other thing was an aberration.
I don’t think that the majority of so called believers (at least in the West) actually do “believe” in God, in the strict sense of the term. For most of these folks, belief in God really does seem to be different from believing that your house is located at its current address, or that the sun will come up tomorrow, or most other truth propositions. Even the most ardent believers do things that it seems they wouldn’t do if they really did think an all-powerful and all-knowing God was keeping tabs on them. And why the avoidance of certain kinds of scientific evidence or Biblical criticism among so many “devout” people if they really believed God exists – it seems that if they really had a firm belief these kinds of things wouldn’t trouble them.
I think the word “belief” as it applies to God has lost its usual meaning and has come to imply more of a statement of allegiance; a proclamation of identity. The person who says she believes in God is usually telling you more about her hopes, values, self-awareness, traditions, or habits of thought than she is expressing agreement with the statement “God exists.”
In other parts of the world, or even certain pockets of this country, there may in fact still be people who have absolute, old-fashioned belief that God exists, in the same sense they believe their children and house exist. However, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has this kind of belief.
Phil
“Even the most ardent believers do things that it seems they wouldn’t do if they really did think an all-powerful and all-knowing God was keeping tabs on them.”
Very good point. That thought has occurred to me more than once. I think it’s rather compelling. If people really did completely undeniably believe it…we would live in a very different (and very strange) world. Funerals would be completely different, just for a start.
I think there’s a lot of splitting the difference. Sort of believing and sort of not.