Domain
Something more from that article by Paul Davies in the Atlantic, which answers a question I’ve been wondering about for a longish time.
Even if Homo sapiens as such may not be the unique focus of God’s attention, the broader class of all humanlike beings in the universe might be. This is the basic idea espoused by the philosopher Michael Ruse, an ardent Darwinian and an agnostic sympathetic to Christianity. He sees the incremental progress of natural evolution as God’s chosen mode of creation, and the history of life as a ladder that leads inexorably from microbes to man.
The question that’s been puzzling me is about Michael Ruse, because some of his work that I’ve read sounds quite religious and some of it doesn’t. Though I’m not entirely sure I understand what Davies means by ‘agnostic’ there – but it doesn’t matter much; the basic point is clear enough: Ruse is a theist. I’m relieved to get that straight. I did a N&C on a review of his a few months ago, picking at some woolly language – woolly language of just the kind that Davies uses in this article, if I remember correctly. Why will people do that? January, it was, now that I’ve looked it up.
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.
I said it in January, so I won’t bother saying too much of it again. But really – I do think that’s pretty woolly stuff. Pretty bogus symmetry. ‘Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions.’ Well, yes, but then science does a better job of coming up with answers that have a good shot at being true. And what is an ultimate question anyway, and why is religion better at asking them than anyone else? If the questions are just unanswerable, is it really to religion’s credit that it not only asks them, it claims to have answers? And the same applies to ‘aiming’ at giving meanings to various things. That’s just empty! It amounts to saying ‘Religion invents answers to ultimate questions and invents a meaning for the world and our place in it.’ And the domain thing seals it all off. ‘This is religion’s domain, where it’s okay to make everything up, and you don’t get to bring science or reason in here to this other domain and ask tiresome questions about all this meaning and all these ultimate questions.’ Come on…can’t people see what a cheat that is? That it’s just not grown-up to make special rules for themselves that way?
Oh well. If they want a domain, a domain they shall have. People like Davies and Ruse can have their domain where they get to have special rules, but the result will be that people who prefer to try to think rationally won’t take them seriously. At least not unless they do better than that.
The odd thing is that that review was published in a science magazine. Why, one wonders. A reader wondered the same thing.
Update: Phil Mole says that Davies’ description of Ruse is not really accurate; that Ruse is sympathetic to religion without actually believing its doctrines, and that his sympathy leads him to say woolly things at times, but he’s not as supportive of religion as Davies implies. I thought it would be fair to add that.
Science addresses theoretical questions as to the causes and composition of the physical world. It operates beyond the horizon of ordinary experience and cognition, but it ultimately must refer back to or connect up with such to explain the motivation and sense of the enterprise. Religion, properly considered, takes place at the level of practical- and not theoretical- reason, the ethico-political domain of questions as to the good and the just. It concerns matters about how one should live one’s life, conduct oneself, what purposes or “ultimate” goods one should dedicate oneself to. Religion is a matter of living beyond one’s death, that is, of connecting to the world through commitment to purposes or ultimate goods beyond one’s ego, which thereby are said to “exist” objectively. Note that there is no theistic claim here, nor any claim for immortality; it is a matter of adopting a certain perspective, an “ultimate” context, in which one orders the contexts of one’s life. Now there is no necessity that one adopt such a perspective. On the other hand, though much religious belief may be delusional, if not hypocritical, there is equally no necessity that it be so. (The theoretic form of theological dogma peculiar to Christianity is an added difficulty. But the re-enforced emphasis on such theoretical “rigor” is a product of the Counter-Reformation reaction to the emergence of modernity and its “progress”. In other words, fundamentalism is a specifically modern formation.) Now scientific or theoretical reason is insufficient to answer questions of practical reason; even a well-formed theoretical or utilitarian proposal, whatever its attractions, must be decided upon on the basis of deliberations on independent grounds. (For example, a proposal may be well warranted to produce economic growth, but whether economic growth is a good thing or ultimately desirable is a separate question.) The desire to reduce such questions to the truth about physical reality simply betrays a defensive anxiety in the face of the fact that others might live their lives in accordance with quite different purposes. But equally such an encounter with otherness might hint at why one would wish to place oneself in a perspective that extends beyond one’s own needs and capacities. And no conception of “human nature”, whether biologically grounded or not, suffices to evade such questions.
In my view, the forgetting of the Aristotelian distinction between practical and theoretical reason is the distortion or defect “modern”- (that is, basically Cartesian)- reason. In the Greek terms, it involves the occlusion of praxis by a theoria put into the service of techne.
I don’t know why you persistently fail to understand anything of these matters. Perhaps you should pick up a book on Vico, the last exponent of the classical tradition of practical reason and the first modern historical thinker. (IIRC, Mark Lilla does a fairly good job as far as clear exposition and scholarliness goes, though his basic thesis that Vico is a precursor of the modern right is anachronistically wrong.)
The above contains a lot of 50 cent words, but after much parsing, it seems to say exactly the same (wrong) thing the Gould, Davies, Ruse and others say.
As for “persistently fail to understand anything of these matters”, it seems quite clear that many of us do understand exactly what is being said, its just we disagree with it with every fibre of our being. It is rather a cheap debating technique to suggest that those who disagree with your point of view are unable to understand it. I understand, and I dispute it fully.
It’s quite possible to agree with much of what John says without needing to bring religion into it at all, isn’t it? And the ‘ethico-political domain’ IMHO works a bloody sight better when religion is kept well out of it.
“I don’t know why you persistently fail to understand anything of these matters.”
I know, I know. It is one of the constant, gnawing puzzles of modern life, isn’t it. Why you persistently fail to understand anything of these matters. It’s a question I never stop asking myself.
“Religion, properly considered, takes place at the level of practical- and not theoretical- reason, the ethico-political domain of questions as to the good and the just.”
Well, that “properly conceived” bit is the whole problem. Who’s to say how religion should be “properly conceived?” It’s only a fairly recent development in intellectual history that many people would even think of claiming that religion doesn’t concern itself with empirical issues, and believe it has definitive answers. And even in our day and age, plenty of believers still view their religion as a comprehensive view of the empirical world.
I wouldn’t be so quick to describe Ruse as a theist, though. I don’t think he is. I think that, like Gould, he is an agnostic who’s sympathetic to religion without actually believing its doctrines. Also like Gould, his sympathy leads him to say some wooly things from time to time.
His book “Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?” gives a pretty good synopsis of Ruse’s stance. Basically, he thinks that the world views of evolution and Christianity overlap at various points, but does NOT proceed to argue that this overlap implies that science leads us to conclude that Chrsitianity is true (Davies’ synopsis seems to imply this, but he’s wrong). Ruse, rather, is simply trying to show that evolution need not ne taken as irrefutable proof that Christianity is FALSE – i.e., that one can be a Christian and a Darwinian without grievous intellectual compromise. That stance is not without its contentious aspects, but it’s not quite as supportive of religion as Davies makes it to be. In fact, Davies’ synopsis makes Ruse sound like an ID proponent, which is far from true.
Phil
Ah, thanks, Phil. That’s good to know. I think I’ll do an addendum to the post, so as not to be unfair to Ruse. So Davies was enlisting Ruse to his side of the argument, perhaps. Tsk – naughty.
And exactly so about the “properly considered” bit. I was going to add that eventually, but I wanted to make my little joke first. As usual.
But yes. As I’ve said several thousand times – if religion is re-defined to mean something quite different from the usual meaning, then (depending on how it’s redefined, of course) I have no quarrel with it, but that’s beside the point, because it is precisely religion as it is usually understood that I do have a quarrel with. That is the subject under discussion. Not religion as an emotion, not religion as an attitude, not religion as cosmic awe, not religion as non-cosmic awe, not religion as ethics, but religion as a set of supernatural beliefs, religion as theism.
And as for “the ethico-political domain of questions as to the good and the just” – that has nothing to do with religion. That conflation is precisely the one I’m disagreeing with. Religion has no special expertise in ethics or politics; in many ways it is disabled for decent thought on the subjects because of its blind reliance on authority and ancient books. The confusion perhaps springs from the fact that religious “leaders” talk about ethics a lot, and sometimes say good things, but non-religious people and leaders sometimes say good things on ethical subjects too. Giving religion a monopoly on ethical thought and discussion is a disastrous idea.
The point is a “logical”/critical one, about differentiating various domains and the sorts of questions that belong respectively to them. It’s not really about “religion” in any specific form at all. It is a matter of avoiding confusions and conflations between domains that obscure respective tasks or result in self-obstructing tasks.
So one can quite rightly beat off fundamentalist creationist or ID attempts to intrude on evolutionary theory and claim to constitute a science. Or one can criticize the ideological/political instrumentalization of religion. Or one can make clear the impossiblity of a general cosmology on the basis of anything we can actually know about the universe and draw into question the tenability of religious claims that claim to require grounding in such. Or one can elucidate the nature and limits of the scientific enterprise in general or the conceptions of Darwinian evolutionary theory as a basic explanatory paradigm for much of biological science. Or one can inform about discoveries or disputes in the evolutionary field. Or one can address ecological crises and potential catastrophes or resourse constraints or the bioethical limits of research. But to engage endlessly in anachronistic attacks on religion, which does not necessarily have anything to do with evolutionary theory and which evolutionary theory is not competent to address, is to precisely set up a self-obstructing task, evoking an endless series of false strawman arguments that accomplish nothing. Now there may be plenty of religious believers out there who entertain all sorts of anachronistic beliefs. But attacking religion in general does nothing to clarify matters, nor does it justify one’s own beliefs, but rather only invites a polemical counter-response and re-enforces precisely the sort of dogmatism that prevents the formation of a modus vivendi, while being irrelevant to any task that belongs to the proper competency of science.
“Religion has no special expertise in ethics or politics”- But that is precisely the point: in these domains there is no such thing as expertise. There is only the deliberative formation of “opinion”, which may be more or less well-informed and well-reasoned, and differing commitments, but there is no certainty, nor even exactitude, and no conclusions that are without risk, nor any final say, but what must inevitably be lived out. Religious people can have reasonable, well-considered opinions in such matters, even when they are specifically informed by their religious beliefs or they may be ignorant idiots. But one would never know, unless one actually talked to them.
The fact of the matter is that religion and evolutionary theory properly have nothing to do with one another and that is a sufficient answer, as opposed to precluding any questions about “ultimate” meaning, value or commitment. Though it would be odd, if one defined one’s human commitments in terms of a “faith” in evolutionary theory.
What point, whose point? My point is indeed about religion, because that’s what I’m talking about. You want to talk about something else. Fine, but I don’t, I want to talk about religion, so that’s what I’m talking about.
My attacks on religion are not in the least anachronistic; witness the demands that Howard Dean deal with his ‘religion problem’ a few months ago. Witness the influence of people like Stephen Carter and Alan Wolfe. Witness a great many contemporary phenomena.
And I simply disagree. I think attacking religion in general in fact does do something to clarify matters. That’s why I do it.
“But that is precisely the point: in these domains there is no such thing as expertise.”
Indeed that is the point. That is why it is worth asking why expertise is so often attributed to religious leaders, or to religion itself. That, again, is why I do it.
“The fact of the matter is that religion and evolutionary theory properly have nothing to do with one another”
Sez you. I, on the other hand, say that is not the fact of the matter. But in any case my point is not that they do, but rather that the business about separate domains is just a way for religion to try to shield itself from awkward or difficult questions.
This paragraph…
“In my view, the forgetting of the Aristotelian distinction between practical and theoretical reason is the distortion or defect “modern”- (that is, basically Cartesian)- reason. In the Greek terms, it involves the occlusion of praxis by a theoria put into the service of techne.”
…reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld where George goes to see the traditional healer. The traditional healer explains his job to Seinfeld using similar language.
Yeah. I’m afraid Mr. Halasz is trying the old trick of intimidation via vocabulary. We’re supposed to think he must be right because he knows so much. But alas for Mr. Halasz, it won’t work. He’ll need to come up with some better arguments, instead.
OB:
No, I’m not redefining religion. I think you’re the one doing quite a bit of conceptual gerrymandering about religion. My point is that religion does not really take place in the dimensions you ascribe to it and anyone who takes it in such narrow terms, pro or con, is open to criticism for it. And the dimensions of concern to religion can not simply be ruled out of court to suit one’s convenience; in one way or another, we are all exposed to them. I myself am an atheist/indifferentist, which means that I think it is the same world and the same human existence for believers and unbelievers alike, the difference being only a matter of differing interpretations. But differing interpretations can no more be eliminated from the “picture” than human freedom itself.
Being myself a leftie, I am disturbed by the political rise of the Christian fundamentalist right, as part of the mobilization of a corporate/”conservative” hegemony. But if such a tendency “pollutes” the public sphere, then it should be realized that it is mobilized in reaction to and on the basis of much else that “pollutes” and disables the public sphere. However, attacking the personal beliefs of others, no matter how obtuse,- especially when the terms of such polemics are narrowly construed and misconceived-, does nothing to clarify the situation, nor analyse its dynamics, nor remedy the terms of public understanding. And it is bootless to imagine that unbelievers are somehow especially afflicted by it and rendered incapable of thinking for themselves or expressing their opinions in a relevant manner.
That bit about “intimidation via vocabulary” is a sheer ad hominem. I am not always rhetorically adept, but my typing manages, at least some of the time, to be clear enough. So, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then, oui, c’est un canard!
Of course, it’s your blog and you are perfectly entitled to your opinions and their expression, which is a different matter from their being well-formed. But you don’t seem to be able to handle criticism very well, dishing it out without taking it and all that sort of thing. Part of being critical is the capacity to reflect upon and respond to the presuppositions and scope of one’s claims. And the idea of criticism is that when one encounters unwarranted presuppositions or limitations in one’s views, one perhaps seeks to become better informed and to rethink the matter. At least, I don’t think such a possibility of “sublation” amounts to any excessively Hegelian optimism. But simple asservation will not do.
ABB:
Techne, from which the words “technology” and “technique” obviously derive, was defined as action which had an external end, as opposed to praxis, which was action that had its end in itself, i.e. action oriented to the cultivation and development of the good life in common. So my comment amounted to a criticism of the tendency toward a technological reduction of science and the substitution of technical, instrumentalist “solutions” for the problems of the political and ethical constitution of human society. It had nothing to do with post-modern obfuscation or the spiritual quests of George Costanza.
But why bother to deal with people who take their sense of culture from “Seinfeld” rather than from “The Simpsons”? Some people just have bad religion.
“It concerns matters about how one should live one’s life, conduct oneself, what purposes or “ultimate” goods one should dedicate oneself to. Religion is a matter of living beyond one’s death.”
I think it’s interesting to ask these sorts of questions. But first I would rate these as ethical or philosophical questions rather than religious ones. Second I don’t think one should grind away at the issue of ultimate purposes with a dogmatic refusal of the possibility that there are no “ultimate” purposes but just purposes local to one’s life. If you have a good reason to believe that there are some ultimate purposes, please share them. I have found that people simply tag “ultimate” to a cause that they have already decided to support because of tradition, values, or comfort. The problem with defining religion as “the search for meaning” is that religion as practiced by a majority of religious people involves, by definition, gods, goddesses, dogmas, priesthoods, sacred texts, etc. In your opinion, this may be a hijacking of the concept of religion, but that’s simply the way the world is. Why don’t you use “ethics” or “philosophy” instead?
John,
A question for you: how do we, as human beings, know “what is right and what is wrong”?
PS: I like the Simpsons too, may be more than I like Seinfeld. Mentioning Seinfeld doesn’t mean I take my sense of culture from it. The statement made was just that — your paragraph reminded me of an episode in Seinfeld; it doesn’t entail anything more. And what is the stuff about bad religion? What is my religion?
JCH
Fair point about the ad hominem. But this goes back to our protracted and unproductive encounter at Twisty Sticks, where I’m afraid I got tired of your staggeringly long and rather pedantically condescending posts. Your posts here are shorter and not quite as condescending, but they do still have that whiff to them – hence my reaction.
I do examine my presuppositions, actually. And as for religion, well, I remain unconvinced – I think you are redefining it. I don’t know how else to say it – what I am talking about in this discussion is religion as commonly understood. Religion as it appears in for instance political rhetoric and popular journalism. That religion is theistic and supernatural; that’s what people mean by it; when they mean something fuzzier they tend to talk about “spirituality.” I think that is in fact exactly why people make a distinction between the two, and often disavow religion but avow “spirituality.” I’m not talking about “spirituality” in this discussion, I’m talking about religion. Okay? That is the subject. You don’t have to be interested in the subject, but I’m not going to change it just because you want to talk about something else.
Chris’ comment:
“I have found that people simply tag “ultimate” to a cause that they have already decided to support because of tradition, values, or comfort.”
Very true. It’s human nature that the values we soak up seem unchallengeable and true. One of the problems with religion as it is often practiced is that it hardens this trait even further – causing us to see our own ideas and biases as divinely ordained. And if our own ideas are divinley ordained, those with whom we disagree must be doing that which is evil in the sight of the Lord.
Phil
Chris Martin:
I would not make strong distinctions between philosophy and religion and matters of ethics. Philosophy emerged amongst the Greeks as a rationalization of Greek religion, which, of course, a much different affair than we now conceive of as religion, while, on the other hand, philosophical ethics tends toward a strong grounding of its matters in notions of autonomy and systematic theory, which I am wary of as ethical conceptions. But Greek philosophy was a species of “enlightenment”, as well, which is to say, de-mythologization, though ambiguous in the extent to which it actually managed to extract itself from its mythological context, insofar as it inaugurated a counter-myth of metaphysical thinking. However, equally, I think it should be recognized that religious traditions contain seeds of their own forms of de-mythification and “enlightenment” is possible to some considerable extent within their terms and ambit. I would point especially to the ethical critique of idolatry central to the development of Judaic tradition here.
I actually was taking up a philosophical tack on the matter, which I specified as “indifferentism”, or, in other words, existential hermeneutics. So, yes, I am taking up religion in a “logically” neutral, conceptual sense. That is probably the core of my dispute with OB, as she wants to restrict matters entirely to an empirical sense and even then to a restricted empirical subset, as those people, which I find projective and muddying- (and which probably owes something to the historical descent of her own philosophical presuppositions.) (I don’t think religious people are necessarily any stupider, more dogmatic, less insightful, or less valuable than purely secular people and that they have nothing to offer that’s worthy of consideration. Such views seem to me to derive from a restriction of religious belief to fundamentalism, which I find no less fundamentalistic, and they strike me as anti-democratic, beclouding the matter without offering an clarification or analysis of the role of religion in civil society and politics. If religious people violate basic civic norms, then they should be told so, but they can not be ruled out of their own existences. If the issue is anti-clericalism, then I would be quite inclined to agree, in the broadest deployment of the term. But then it should not be forgotten that religious traditions tend to have been promulgated and transmitted accompanied by their own considerable doses of anti-clericalism.) At any rate, I would at least claim for my approach that it has the not inconsiderable merit of rendering issues about religious matters comparable and thus discussable across the divide between belief and unbelief.
I myself do not think that “ultimate” questions have determinate “answers”, but I don’t think such questions can be ruled out of court, which for me flattens things out and unduly reduces the range of considerations. To the contrary, I think it is good to attempt to understand and construe such “ultimate” questions and their import, which is to say, to understand why human beings are inclined, more or less strongly, to raise them and the sorts of needs and concerns that they involve. As language bearing beings, we are raised out of the immediacy of nature and into a world, in which we orient ourselves by means of meaning and its horizons of counterfactual possibilities, such that the search for meaning is well-nigh inevitable. But I would strictly emphasize the thinking of human finitude and the non-identity between thought and being. Of course, it is a fundamental philosophical urge to want to know the limits of possibility, but such limits can not be construed on the basis of an “eternal” metaphysical logic: they are, in their uncertain prospects, historically changing and riddled with the contingency of destruction and new emergence. (At any rate, between metaphysical teleology and naturalistic causal immanentism, there is the third alternative of teleonomic organization. Hegel’s philosophy was a metaphysical teleology of history, though one conceived so as the take account of Kantian transcendental strictures. Marx’ theory of history, disentangled from some of his own confusions and dogmatisms, is properly construed a teleonomic account.) For me, the “ultimate” questions would concern human fate, the destiny of human society and our connection to the world which exceeds us, regardless of whether this occurs in the theater of G-d and His creation or in its absence. The only possible “answers” are those that must be lived out in limited freedom. Though, as I implied clearly in my first post, there is no necessity that people in their limited freedom take up such questions.
I don’t know that religious belief is necessarily comforting rather than unsettling, any more than philosophy offers its consolation, unless grim and bitter understanding, like virtue, is supposed to be its own reward. But I would emphasize that as socio-cultural beings, we always stand within some sort of inherited tradition, into which we are raised, trained, and educated and from which we can never entirely get clear, and that we can do so, to the extent that we can, only through the expansion and reinterpretation of its resources. (At the limit, deconstructionism would be the attempt to get entirely shut of traditions, if that’s your cup of tea.) And religious traditions not least enter into our horizons of socio-cultural understanding in ways that are not easily denied, uprooted, or replaced. I don’t think modern, secular people in general are sufficiently aware of this conditioning. But this means that we can not so easily get shut of questions of authority, nor of the political paradox of the relation between freedom to authority. In this context, religious fundamentalism and post-structuralist/post-modernist “theory”, can be seen as equal and opposite reactions to the bewilderments of living in our modern, highly differentiated social condition.
“the search for meaning is well-nigh inevitable.”
Yes. But then one can also take the next step (or at any rate a next step, or another step) and realise (or decide, or come to think) that the question remains unanswerable, the search somewhat fruitless. One can realise that we create our own meaning, and that the meaning is inevitably highly temporary. Writ in water, as Keats said.
Look at the characters in the Tale of Genji, for example. They’re always aware of that – they never stop talking about it. It’s a Buddhist thing, or anyway a 10th century Japanese Buddhist thing.
“I don’t think religious people are necessarily any stupider, more dogmatic, less insightful, or less valuable than purely secular people”
That’s a bizarre comment. “Religious people” are not the subject, and no one has said “religious people” are necessarily or unnecessarily any of those things. Is that just a spot of moral posturing, of conspicuous virtue, of attempted shaming, of saying “You’re an elitist” without using the word? Because that’s what it looks like to me.
There is a good deal in what you say, overall. I even agree with some of it. But not all. In a time and place when religion and “faith” are urged on everyone, I think it’s worth being blunt.