What happened to secularism?
Sue Blackmore is right.
“Religious faith is not inconsistent with reason.” I nearly choked on my breakfast when I heard this on the Today programme. These words were spoken by Mr Blair, in his inimitably sincere style. He was addressing an Islamic conference in London, on June 4…But religious faith is inconsistent with reason (and much more that we value as well)…Faith is corrosive to the human mind. If someone genuinely believes that it is right to believe things without reason or evidence then they are open to every kind of dogma, whim, coercion, or dangerous infectious idea that’s around. If someone is convinced that it is acceptable to base their beliefs on what is written in an ancient book, or what some teacher tells them they must believe, then they will have no true freedom of thought; they will be trapped by their faith into inconsistency and untruths because they are unable to throw out false ideas when evidence against them comes along.
The usual reply to that (along with a lot of abuse and random insult about aging and fundamentalism and jowls) is that there are plenty of rational people who have religious faith. The reply to that, I think, is ‘Yes, maybe, but only to the extent that they don’t allow the ‘faith’ to transfer to anything other than religion, which condition itself means that faith is not consistent with reason.’ The two have to be kept firmly separated for reason to be reason (and faith to be faith), and that surely means that they’re not compatible, not that they are.
[U]niversities should be teaching people how to think, question, and understand these things, not to have faith in “truths” proclaimed without reason or evidence. Tony Blair pronounces the word “faith” with just that touch of special reverence in his voice, as though it were something to respect, something we should admire in others and grant them licence to believe whatever they want on its account. Indeed he proclaimed that the conference was “an opportunity to listen; to hear Islam’s true voice; to welcome and appreciate them; and in doing so, to join up with all those who believe in a world where religious faith is respected”. How despicable. How creepy. How frightening when we see the dire consequences of faith-based actions all around us…I, for one, do not want to live in a world where religious faith is respected…[O]ur great universities should continue to teach people to think for themselves, to respect the truth, and to take nothing on faith.
Exactly, about that touch of special reverence in the voice. That’s what the word ‘faith’ is for, really: to summon up that creepy tone of voice. The hell with that.
Blair says some very dubious things in that speech.
We have successful Muslims in all areas of our national life – business, sport, media, culture, the professions. We have our first Muslim MPs, first Muslim Members of the House of Lords; hopefully the next election will bring more and hopefully also the first women Muslim MPs.
That’s a bizarre thing to hope. Does he hope the next election will bring more Sikh MPs? More Hindus? More Jains? More Shintoists? Mormons? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Baptists? Mennonites? Dukhobors? Orthodox Jews? Catholics? Christians?
Probably not. But then why more Muslims? Because he’s treating them as a minority group, excuse me a minority community, rather than (or as well as) adherents of a religion. But he shouldn’t do that, because that causes him to say there should be more adherents of a particular religion in Parliament, and that’s an anti-secular suggestion if I ever heard one.
In the face of so much high profile accorded to religious extremism, to schism, and to confrontation, it is important to show that religious faith is not inconsistent with reason, or progress, or the celebration of diversity. Religious faith has much to contribute to the public sphere; is still a thriving part of what makes a cohesive community; is a crucial motivator of millions of citizens around the world; and is an essential if non-governmental way of helping to make society work. To lose that contribution would not just be a pity; it would be a huge backward step.
Another anti-secular suggestion, to put it mildly.
There is also a clear move across the world to assert strongly the moderate and true authority of Islam. In Jordan, in 2004, under the leadership of HM King Abdullah, a statement, the Amman Message was released seeking to declare what Islam is and what it is not, and how it should be manifested. I was deeply impressed when, the next year, the King convened 200 leading scholars from no less than 50 countries, who unanimously – unanimously – issued a Declaration on 3 basic issues: the validity of different Islamic schools of thought and theology; the forbidding of declarations of apostasy between Muslims; and criteria for the issuing of fatwas – religious edicts – to pre-empt the spawning of illegitimate versions.
What does he mean the true authority of Islam? Why is he talking admiringly about the authority of a religion? Why is he impressed by that Declaration? What about declarations of apostasy between Muslims and non-Muslims or ex-Muslims? Why is he validating the idea of fatwas at all, however criteria-bound they are?
Also in 2005, the summit meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference issued a declaration and a 10-year action plan. The summit reaffirmed Islam as a religion of moderation and modernity. It rejected bigotry and extremism. It supported work to establish the values of Islam as those of understanding, tolerance, dialogue and multilateralism.
That’s not all the OIC did in 2005. Furthermore – Blair neglects to mention the little matter of the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. Well he ought to. The whole damn speech is evasive that way. Flattering, obsequious, and evasive. He ought not to do that.
“The two have to be kept firmly separated for reason to be reason (and faith to be faith), and that surely means that they’re not compatible, not that they are.”
But does that really follow? If you believe it is possible to compartmentalize NOMA-fashion, and to contemplate one state-of-affairs by religious faith, and another state-of-affairs with the use of reason, it seems to me it follows that faith and reason are “not inconsistent”, in that a person could employ both without getting into contradictions, etc. Of course, the underlying thought is that the worlds contemplated by one or the other are ultimately very different ones, and in that sense “incompatible” – but the NOMA proponent would argue that compatibility is an impossible demand, i.e. there is no more-or-less unified world which can be related to by either faith or reason. If you grant the NOMA proponent this premiss, you would have to grant as well that reason and faith are “not inconsistent” in that they belong to irreducibly different contexts. But if you dispute the premiss, you would also have to dispute the rationality of the person allowing faith to reign in one context, reason in another.
As an aside, we’ve bickered a lot about the definition of “faith”, but what is your definition of “reason”?
I think it does follow; that’s why I said it. I believe it is possible to compartmentalize NOMA-fashion, but I don’t at all believe in NOMA – I hate NOMA, I think that’s one of the worst ideas Gould ever had and one of the worst books he ever wrote. I do think it’s possible to compartmentalize but I don’t think what one gets in the compartment where there is faith and no reason is worth much. I think it’s possible but dubious; possible but not particularly respectable. (One reason I detest Gould’s version of NOMA is because he breezily grants religion exclusive expertise in meaning and morality; since I think it has no expertise and certainly no exclusive expertise, I think that’s a ludicrous concession.)
And why is the compartmentalization necessary? Because ‘faith’ is worthless everywhere it really counts. It can’t transfer because it’s useless. That to me is not a sign that the two are compatible. It’s occurred to me that that notion of compatability is a debater’s trick – it just means that people can do it in a sense (by splitting their mental lives), not that the two are genuinely compatible.
I don’t have a definition of reason, but if I did it would be something like doing one’s best. Intellectually. Not fudging evidence, not making stuff up, not ignoring evidence, not deploying rhetoric, not playing silly games.
“And why is the compartmentalization necessary? Because ‘faith’ is worthless everywhere it really counts. It can’t transfer because it’s useless.”
That sums up the problem with NOMA very nicely.
Here’s my (partial) definition of “reason”: What we use to get from the specific to the abstract, and back again.
Faith: Recognition of something as true without evidence.
Furthermore…
“If you believe it is possible to compartmentalize NOMA-fashion, and to contemplate one state-of-affairs by religious faith, and another state-of-affairs with the use of reason”
Note the careful language. Of course I believe it is possible to “contemplate one state-of-affairs by religious faith” – because that’s dead easy, and not a form of inquiry or genuine truth-seeking. It’s possible to contemplate anything by anything, but that doesn’t make the contemplation epistemically worth anything.
Come on, Merlijn – what are you talking about? Are you claiming that one can actually find out anything by means of religious faith? Not contemplate, ponder, muse on, speculate about, but find out? Because I don’t believe that for a second. I don’t think religious faith is compatible with genuine intellectual honesty, which is what I mean by doing one’s best. Faith is about maintaining beliefs in the teeth of the evidence – that’s what the word means. No, that is not compatible with reason. It can be made to occupy the same world by a process of rigid separation, but that’s all, and I maintain the need for rigid separation is an obvious indication that the two pull in flatly opposite directions.
If you define faith as believing things in the teeth of evidence, and reason as doing one’s best to find out – then obviously, faith and reason are incompatible. The problem here is that both words are used in a somewhat vague, emotionally loaded fashion. That’s why I asked you for your definition of reason.
I like that Blackmore – literally colourful character that she is- stepped up to disprove Theo Hobson’s stupid contention that atheists (or at least atheist commentators) were mainly tired old men.
Oh blair’s speech has been obsequious enough to be reproduced in its entirety in a major malaysian newspaper and is being discussed on m’sian blogs. I never realised that there still exist people who look to Tony to validate their beliefs.
Slightly off topic, but I hope, OB, you have seen the Washington Post article that waxes most enthusiastic about re-Christianizing Denmark. It could give you hours of target practice. Including comments about the most unfortunate science thing that happened in the 18th century that put a spanner in Danish faith, alas. Including, as a bonus, some pious comments from Bush’s ambassador to Denmark about everybody’s favorite cartoon controversy:
U.S. Ambassador James P. Cain said that he and his family wanted to go to church shortly after they arrived in Denmark in the summer of 2005. But when they turned up for a scheduled Sunday service at a Danish Lutheran church, they found the door chained and padlocked. The next week, he said, they tried a different Lutheran church, where the entire attendance at the service was nine people — his family and bodyguards, plus two Danes.
Cain said Denmark’s lack of religious culture was partly to blame for last year’s Muhammad cartoons controversy, in which a Danish paper published unflattering caricatures of Islam’s most revered prophet, touching off Muslim fury around the world.
“That, for the first time in a generation, caused the Danes to realize that their loss of faith and their increasing secularism made it very difficult for them to understand, or even feel empathy for, people who felt offended by caricatures of religious images,” Cain said.
Blair can only envy the effortless dying fall in the voice of the Yankee All Jesus politico when it comes to … loss of faith. I got choked up myself.
I feel that proposing ‘Reason’ as incompatible with religion is a bit one-sided. One-sided in that humanity wallows in a range of unreasons, from Waldorf schools to vitamin C, to ordinary gambling, to horoscopes, to trusting fatuous political ideas, to environmentalism, to ‘the blank slate’, to Freudianism, on and on endlessly. Look at the huge variety of cognitive traps we know about – the assymetry of loss vs gains in valuing consequences of decisions, self-serving bias and so forth. Look at the endless deaths contributed by self-righteousness trumping evidence-based approaches – I am talking about indigenous suicide, AIDS, malaria, third world poverty, post-modern criminology…
All these unreasons are permitted, normal to people, and more or less functionally managed by ‘reasonable’ individuals, the ‘person in the street’; yet many of them are monstrously pernicious to the ideal of people making choices based on ‘reason’.
How we take the dichotomy presented, reason OR religion, seriously? Humans discovered and constructed and employed reason, they didn’t have it then wilfully throw it away like some kind of original sin.
If ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ are both prone to being used in a vague, emotionally laden fashion, then let’s dump those words. Let’s focus on some concepts which are quite a bit less ambiguous and emotionally laden, but which are certainly essential to any definition of reason: inquiry and fallibilism. That is, a reasoned approach to ANYTHING (solving a problem, determining the truth of a belief, making a decision) requires (1) honestly, rigorously searching for the truth rather than assuming that whatever you already believe is true, and (2) being willing to admit it when something you think is true turns out not to be upon further inquiry.
Inquiry without fallibilism is a sham, because rejecting fallibilism amounts to assuming what you already believe (or come to believe) must be true. It is sheer rationalization, going through the motions of justification to confirm – or rather, reiterate – conclusions determined on some other basis. On the other hand, fallibilism without inquiry is willful self-deception. Whatever form it takes, this move is equivalent to saying, “I might be wrong, but I’m not going to ask any of the tough questions that might lead me to finding out that I’m wrong.” One cannot reject either of these key components of reason without effectively rejecting reason in its entirety.
Every version of NOMA or compartmentalizing of religious beliefs into their own special category seems to require one or the other of these two sneaky rejections of reason, either inquiry without fallibilism or vice versa. I’m not saying it’s necessarily so for every possible way of compartmentalizing, but it sure looks that way to me. Holding beliefs as a matter of faith*, however, is always at odds with reason: Either such beliefs are not the product of substantial inquiry (held on the basis of authority, emotional preference, unverifiable and unsharable private insight or revelation, etc.), or they are not held in a manner consistent with fallibilism (clung to despite lack of evidence, or even evidence to the contrary) – usually both.
*There’s that pesky word again. But I think that the claim I make about faith’s conflict with inquiry and fallibilism is true for any definition of ‘faith’ consistent with how the word is most commonly used in relation to religious beliefs, and by religious adherents themselves. ‘Faith’ used as a word equivalent to ‘hope’ or ‘trust’ need not apply.
You could quite easily aply that argument to the way people veiw polotics as well G.for instance people will often regect ideas regardless of merit because they come from the other side.
ChrisPer: The conflict under discussion is not really this grand absolute Reason v. Religion dichotomy you are characterizing. The only direct conflict at stake here is reason as a way of arriving at beliefs v. faith as a way of arriving at beliefs. To say that faith is a highly unreliable and undesirable way of establishing the truth of any claim whatsoever is not to say that there are no other unreliable and undesirable ways of establishing truth. Also, to say that reason is a good way – indeed, the only reliable and therefore desirable way – of establishing the truth of claims is not to say that everyone who claims to have arrived at a conclusion by reasoning has in fact engaged in good reasoning, or reasoning at all. So what’s your point, exactly?
All the cognitive flaws you talk about that make achieving good reasoning so difficult for humans are real problems, and they make the world a worse place in and of themselves. Granted. But can’t you see that treating religious belief as a special category deserving extreme deference and valorizing faith as a “way of knowing” and all that crap is a way of giving cover to all those cognitive flaws and more? If you give up justifying beliefs entirely – and that’s exactly what faith is all about – then you can adopt any position you want. If faith beliefs have a special social status that puts them beyond criticism, then you can adopt any position you want and not even be called on it – no matter how ludicrous, unsupported, and pernicious your position is! If and when you are called on some position, you can shift the terms of the argument to being about religion and faith – which are taken to be good things without analysis or question – instead of having the attention be focused on the particular pernicious belief or agenda you are pushing.
I’m really surprised that you are arguing against the rather obvious connection here: You specifically cited AIDS as a topic in your list of “endless deaths contributed by self-righteousness trumping evidence-based approaches…” Almost every single bit of the opposition to rational AIDS policies around the world has its roots pernicious religious beliefs, from the U.S. right wing insistence on abstinence -focused strategies to the Catholic opposition to condoms. Not all self-righteousness is religious, of course. But religious institutions are especially encouraging of – and religious persons are especially prone to – displays of extraordinary self-righteousness. Comes from the conviction that God is on one’s side, I suspect.
P.S. I almost admire the way you snuck in “environmentalism” in the middle of your list of woo and nonsense, as if being concerned about waste dumping or global warming is as irrational as embracing astrology or Freudian psychology. Mind you, I know there are lots of very whacky environmentalists – but to throw all environmentalists into the same crazy-bin with Earth Firsters and the like is, if deliberate, an insidious rhetorical maneuver worthy of Karl Rove. Why did you do that, I wonder? And while I’m wondering, what in the world is “post-modern criminology”?
And, you have to be careful of “reason”, as well.
I got picked up on, here a year or so back, for using “reason” – without including empiricism.
Reason, without tests and checks can get you into just as deep a hole as “faith”.
This is the difference that the practice of science has made.
Reason ALONE is not enough – you MUST do a reality-check.
But “faith” doesn’t need a reality-check.
Perhaps that’s the difference:
Does your method and world-view include reality checks?
If not, it ain’t worth the paper it’s written on!
Richard: See my response to ChrisPer. To say that faith is in conflict with reason is not the same as saying that faith is the only way of establishing beliefs which conflicts with reason, so your response is… not a response. It’s a red herring, an attempt to change the subject.
Lots of people arrive at conclusions for all sorts of bad reasons, of course. But Tony Blair doesn’t go around touting the virtues of knee-jerk rejection of opponent’s claims, or praising the practice of cherry-picking evidence. He does go on and on about how wonderful faith is, though. And for the reasons given above, this willful insistence that faith is wonderful in spite of any evidence to the contrary is both a problem in itself and a magnifier for other problems.
Here is an (edited) version of what I posted to the Graunid’s thread – which seems to have wandered right off-topic, with the usual religious apologists waffling, without a reality-check (see previous post)
Anthony Blair is not a fool, or he would not have become Prime Minister.
Therefore he must be a ********** ****.
Faith is defined as: “belief without evidence”.
So, presumably, our PM doesn’t need evidence before he acts, and he wouldn’t do anything like that, would he?
Oh, wait a minute – or should that be 45 minutes?
Wishful
Muddled
Duplicity
Check the initials of that phrase, above.
G. Tingey: That’s another mark in favor of the term “inquiry.” It implies going and finding out, not sitting in your chair and thinking about it real hard.
A final thought before bed. (I’m not in any UK time zone by a long shot.)
One of the more insidious aspects of the conflict between faith in reason is that most people think of themselves as being much more open to learning new things and changing their minds than they actually are. Both engaging in rigorous inquiry and maintaining genuine fallibilism are DIFFICULT tasks – and for reasons of talent, training and inclination, not everyone is equally skilled at those tasks.
Also, it’s a cruel fact that those who are least skilled in a given area are also least able to judge their own lack of skill. (Mark Hoofnagle gives a nice short summary of a study researching this sort of incompetence-blindness here.) As a consequence, while faith as such may be inconsistent with reason, it is not unusual for people who hold very strong faith beliefs to be convinced not only that those faith beliefs are also rationally grounded (i.e. they believe that faith and reason are consistent when they actually aren’t), but that they are very skilled reasoners overall. Worse still, they may in fact be very skilled reasoners in some regards, but the human capacity for compartmentalization and self-delusion keeps them from seeing that they don’t apply those skills equally well everywhere.
I presume he wanted to ameliorate eome of the antiwar contingent and also is preparing the ground for himself to be remembered as the statesman who brought us Peace in Northern Ireland. He’s got no chance of course, and this obsequious guff is just bloody typical of the sanctimonious and divisive git. 1/10.
Two things:
Firstly GTingey’s premise:
Anthony Blair is not a fool, or he would not have become Prime Minister.
Change this to:
George W. Bush is not a fool, or he would not have become American President.
Gtingey’s argument is thus unsound, even if the conclusion
Therefore he must be a ********** **** is valid.
Secondly:
On the compatibility of faith and reason, Try to read Summa Theologica (if you have a sleepless night). Aquinas is convinced they are compatible and it is reason which whill convert the infidel to faith. When you finally (after a titanic struggle) reach the last book, Aquinas basically says that if by this stage the infidel has failed to convert, kill him. Which is all very reasonable.
Mike Rogers:
Geo W,. Shrub may be a very unpleasant piece of work, but I don’t think is a fool.
Ever come across basically stupid, but very crafty/slippery people?
Second-Hand Car Dealers come to mind.
So my premise still stands.
And, of course, Geo W. Shrub is just a front-man for Cheney et al anyway ……
Have to agree with G Tingey there: before W was elected first time round, a BBC film crew followed him around the Primaries. Some of the journos attached to the press pack were smart political correspondents from the FT etc and on more than one occasion they were visibly ammused -not by displays of stupidity – but with his quick-wittedness. Put simply the man can’t talk publically, but he’s no dullard. More likely explanation of his casual clumsy, non-commital, detached nature to major issues of the day is that unless those major issues *directly* and *adversly* affect his billionaire supporters, it just don’t matter bubba.
He just shrugs: “Who cares?”
GWB’s exact IQ may be unknowable, but surely it is beyond dispute that until he got into politics he was a dead weight on his father’s network of business associates and favour-doers? He couldn’t find oil in Texas, for Dawkins’ sake!
Merlijn,
“If you define faith as believing things in the teeth of evidence, and reason as doing one’s best to find out – then obviously, faith and reason are incompatible.”
Well good – that’s all I’m claiming.
“The problem here is that both words are used in a somewhat vague, emotionally loaded fashion.”
Of course, which is part of my point; I think Blair, and people who make that claim in general, rely on that in order to get away with the claim.
ChrisPer,
“I feel that proposing ‘Reason’ as incompatible with religion is a bit one-sided.”
But that’s not what I said; I was quoting Blair, and his terms were reason and faith, not reason and religion. I think claiming religion and reason are compatible is much less blatantly absurd than claiming that faith and reason are. Religion is partly institutional, communitarian, social, etc etc etc, so there is more room for combining the two. But faith and reason? No – that’s nonsense – they are stark opposites; it’s just a ridiculous claim.
Come to think of it – it suddenly occurs to me that Blair may have done some self-hoisting by own petard there. Maybe he was using the word ‘faith’ in New Labour fashion to mean simply ‘religion’ there, in which case the claim is not as absurd as it is if he meant the more usual and literal meaning. But that’s the problem with all these woolly cuddly shifts in meaning. If he meant religion he should have damn well said religion.
Bush is probably not ‘stupid’ in the sense most people use the word, but I suspect there are many occassions when he is the least cognitively able person in the room.
I think the whole “people of faith” style code words for religion is part of the valorization of faith, and quite deliberately so. Many religious adherents are not all that focused on or driven by faith as such: In fact, many of the most widely admired religious figures display nothing that looks much at all like faith (such as the Dalai Lama) – and certainly looks nothing like the dogmatic faith of Biblical literalists and Islamic fundamentalists. The problem is that the qualities which make many religious persons admirable have nothing to do with their believing things on a deeply flawed basis: But describing all religious adherents in terms of “faith” falsely borrows the admiration such people earn for other reasons. Using “faith” as a euphemism for adherence to any religion whatsoever (even Buddhism, which involves no faith at all) exploits whatever esteem people hold for religion and attaches it to what is perhaps the most problematic and least admirable part of religious adherence.
<> “(even Buddhism, which involves no faith at all)”. <>
“There’s not “faith” in the Christian sense, but there is what’s called “saddha”, which translates as conviction”.
Doug wrote:
“Here’s my (partial) definition of “reason”: What we use to get from the specific to the abstract, and back again.
Faith: Recognition of something as true without evidence.”
The first is very good. It’s actually better than the definition I had in mind when I posited my question to OB. I was thinking of reason as both making valid inferences on the basis of concepts, etc. as on desirable future states and purposeful action undertaken to attain it. But desirable future states-of-affairs are abstract objects, so also practical syllogisms could be incorporated in your definition.
It’s the second I have problems with, regardless of whether G thinks non-epistemological definitions of faith need apply or not. It seems to me to be quite possible to be a philosophical theist without actually having faith as such. Asserting the existence of (a) God as such can be done more or less reasonably; but it is rather one’s attitude, one’s stance towards Deity, the universe as the creation of that Deity, etc. which seems to me to be encapsulated by the term “faith”. In other words, faith seems to me to refer not so much to belief in a proposition as to trust in a Deity.
It’s perfectly possible, again, to believe in the existence of God without taking the particular stance designated (in my opinion) by faith: the Enlightenment Deists such as Paine come to mind, who would regard nature itself as reflective of Divine reason; it is dubious to which extent this resulted in a specifically faith-like attitude to nature. On the other hand, we have the virtual disconnection between the two realms in modern-day liberal Protestantism: one can have an active faith in God while explicitly denying knowledge concerning the existence of God.
In that sense, the NOMA principle is very Protestant; where Catholicism has always drawn upon philosophy and therewith reason to justify the existence of God, liberal Protestantism is much more dismissive towards this enterprise. What struck me about Gould’s NOMA was that the two “magisteria” are religion and science – which seems to leave out philosophy as ultimately underpinning both science and the abstract central statements of religion as well (divorced of their “faith” dimension). This aside from the fact that it is precisely philosophically that one might want to inform an atheistic, secular idea about meaning and morality (the possibility of which seems to be neglected in Gould’s scheme, as OB mentions).
I would thus tend to reject NOMA, as I think it is a possible trap for theists. The kind of liberal Protestant compartmentalization I raised as a possibility to OB seems to me first of all to run counter to the intuition that we live in a single universe, not two; this does not mean that religion and science supersede each other in some kind of simplistic manner, but that they (in my view) should both be somehow integrated in a holistic worldview. Second, I think the kind of fundamentalist literalism of the Creationists and the Answers in Genesis types is just the other side of the NOMA coin. Without a framework in which to philosophically interpret scientific findings (which may of course be a theistic or an atheistic one), either religion retreats into its own magisterium or, alternatively, propositions lifted from Scripture are presented as simple facts, of the same kind as the scientific ones are alleged to be.
In either case, the “underlying framework” is missing. I should stress again that such a framework need not be theistic (physicalism and materialism are usually non-theistic ones; but even idealism and Platonic realism can be held non-theistically as I think Roger Penrose does). In either case, such frameworks are obviously amenable to reason, though not to empirical disproof, probably neither to ultimate rational proof or disproof (seeing as all the big alternatives that arose during the classical age are still around).
So, my position would be that 3rd-person statements about God such as “God exist” and the like are amenable to both rational criticism and rational defence. So, they are compatible with reason. And they are compatible with faith. But they are not identical with faith. The set of 2nd person attitudes which seem, to me, to be encapsulated in “faith” may or may not be compatible with reason, depending on whether the 3rd-person statements underlying them are held as justifiable, fallible, etc. I would argue the two are compatible in principle, but certainly not always in practice. I think NOMA-like attitudes actually do more harm than good in this regard (though I would find it hard to fault an religious adherent to NOMA reflectively aware of the fallibility or unreasonability of his beliefs).
“I think NOMA-like attitudes actually do more harm than good in this regard”
One area in which I suspect I would strongly agree with G is that the attitude seems tantamount to breaking with Peirce’s admonishment “do not block the road of inquiry”. Which is precisely what is being done when given statements are regarded as amenable only to given modes of thought (scientific, religious).
Merlijn, as is often the case, your contribution puzzles me. When I say that non-epistemological conceptions of faith need not apply, all I really mean is that THEY ARE NOT RELEVANT to the matter at hand. You seem always want to talk about what it is possible for people to believe when the subject under discussion is what people actually do believe – to wit, “It seems to me to be quite possible to be a philosophical theist without actually having faith as such.” Fine. So what? The notion that one might be able to somehow be some sort of abstract philosophical theist without having faith has very little to do with what the vast majority of religious adherents around the world believe and how they act. And it has nothing at all to do with the criticism of Blair and others who valorize and promote faith as if it were a valid and altogether uncontroversial alternative to the actual search for truths based on evidence and constant critical questioning.
That said, I after several re-readings I think I understand why your comments are more relevant than I thought at first blush. You think that the alternate account of faith you are giving is not primarily epistemological, and so is not subject to my criticism that faith is inconsistent with the key inquiry and fallibilism components of reason I defined above. Now that I think I understand, I don’t think I can agree.
I will grant that one might believe in a sufficiently abstract sort of God for reasons that have nothing to do with faith, but rather as a result of fallibilistic inquiry (however flawed, in my opinion). That is, I will grant that one might be a theist without faith (and therefore without one’s beliefs and attitudes necessarily being in conflict with reason). But I’m not sure the next step escapes the criticism I outline above: “In other words, faith seems to me to refer not so much to belief in a proposition as to trust in a Deity.” Placing trust in a person is a perfectly ordinary sort of epistemological procedure, grounded in evidence and subject to error and so on. Placing any significant amount of trust in a ill-defined Deist sort of “Nature’s God” does not follow the ordinary epistemology of trust one uses for trusting or distrusting people, so I have serious doubts that it’s the sort of thing which can be consistent with honest critical inquiry and dedicated fallibilism.
In short, what makes trust in God – even an abstract, vaguely defined Deist sort of god – any more rationally grounded than ordinary faith-based claims about the world? Even if the claim that this sort of God exists is rationally defensible (which I have conceded only for the sake of argument, mind you), it does not follow that trusting in such a God is consistent with reason. Trust is not just an attitude: Trust is grounded in a claim about the world which serves as a basis for action – the claim that a given person/entity is worthy of trust and can be relied on to do the right thing. In effect, trust in God is a belief about God’s benevolence. As such, it seems no more driven by evidence-focused inquiry and subject to revision based on further inquiry than other sorts of faith beliefs about God.
I am not seeking here to give a wholly negative definition of faith, such that any belief or attitude which demonstrates inconsistency with reason automatically must be faith. (This has been a persistent misunderstanding in this thread, though I don’t quite see how that misunderstanding is possible.) But I am saying that every definition of ‘faith’ consistent with how the word is used in the context of religiosity (indeed, as the word is used by religious adherents themselves) is inconsistent with one or both of the key components of reason I defined above.
“You seem always want to talk about what it is possible for people to believe when the subject under discussion is what people actually do believe”
Well, the question was whether faith and reason are incompatible. Which does seem to me to refer to possibilities, rather than actualities.
As for the argument you raise concerning trust in God and its inconsistency with reason: I think I agree that faith in that sense cannot be built on rational inquiry if it is to be anything corresponding to faith as commonly used. But I’m not sure at all if it is impervious to revision based on inquiry.
Wow, great work, all of you, especially G.
“it has nothing at all to do with the criticism of Blair and others who valorize and promote faith as if it were a valid and altogether uncontroversial alternative to the actual search for truths based on evidence and constant critical questioning.”
Perhaps a reason we argue past each other so comprehensively is that the whole problem is not one-dimensional polarisation (faith-reason), but multi-dimensional. I am just re-reading ‘Alexander’, (hunting a quote purportedly by Aristotle) and I am struck by the idea of public virtue, a range of desirable characteristics in a citizen as seen by his contemporaries.
Public virtue requires several aspects; mere intellectual excellence or military vigor are not enough. A display of appropriate beliefs and shared social ideals is one component of that virtue.
One positive benefit of religion has always been that it provides that continuing and known set of ideals and norms; no-one has to develop and post his individual theses on his own door for his peers to decide whether or not they will eat with him.
Instead, a Nicene creed aloud in company simplifies that function!
Blair’s statement of faith is not a call to replace Science with Inquisition. If any one here noticed an attempt to replace the courts with trial by combat on the basis of faith and reason together, do point it out to me; I may have read inattentively yet again.
Rather it is a display of public virtue: spine, and affirming public moral standards. He is prepared to stand for something, something unfashionable and possibly wrong, and to be judged by his performance against the known ideals of that position.
I hear that one of the intellectual virtues is charity, abstaining from wilfully misreading the worst into an opponent’s position. Probably it is realistic to distinguish the lunacy of the Creation Science museum from a rhetorical expession of a person’s background and ideals.
‘faith seems to me to refer not so much to belief in a proposition as to trust in a Deity.’
Well, it does both. I agree that it also does the second, and that in a way the second can be seen as more important (this is the four-step again), but it’s odd to have trust in a deity without believing it exists.
I’m quite interested in this loop; I’ve been pondering it a good deal lately. I know what ChrisPer means – I’ve said before that I think one important way people think of God is simply as the personification (as it were) of Good. But – there are other epistemic effects, which I don’t have time to go into right now.
“Blair’s statement of faith is not a call to replace Science with Inquisition.”
But nobody said it was. That’s not the point; that’s not the point at all. But it is a call to accept the idea that reason and faith go together – that’s not an uncharitable reading, it’s what he said.
I agree with you that good is good; but I don’t agree that that’s what Blair was saying; and even if I did, he was in that statement basically talking about cognitive matters, and I don’t see why we should charitably read it differently.
“I agree that it also does the second, and that in a way the second can be seen as more important (this is the four-step again), but it’s odd to have trust in a deity without believing it exists.”
Agreed it’s odd – but not impossible. G and I had a discussion on the concept of agnostic believers some threads back, as I recall.
Oh, anything’s possible, Merlijn, but as G says, so what? Sure it’s possible, but it’s ridiculous – it’s bad thinking. And in aid of what? In aid of ‘trusting’ a God or a universe that is at best indifferent to suffering? That’s just ‘trusting’ the local sadist – it’s possible, but it’s not particularly admirable.
The answer to “so what?” in this case is that I’m defending the idea that there is no necessary connection between faith and statements of fact. Seeing as faith is often presented as precisely being a statement of fact without supporting evidence, I can hardly be accused of strawmannism here. The wider relevance of the point is that if this idea is correct, the question about the compatibility of faith and reason becomes quite a nuanced one.
I was a bit careless before in failing to distinguish between the combination of faith and the eschewment of knowledge-claims; and the combination of faith and the eschewment of belief in the existence of God. The former position is almost mainstream in some religious currents (and though I disagree with it, I do not consider it ‘bad thinking’) but the latter is held as well: either in some kind of mystical encounter with a reality about which no positive propositions can be made, or as a position God is a human construct, yet can be entered in a relationship with.
I find it hard, personally, to make sense of these concepts. But precisely for that reason I’m unwilling to take a position on their compatibility or incompatibility with rationality.
Erm, embarassing question.
What is: NOMA ?
Faith is generally defined as belief without evidence, not as being a statement of fact without supporting evidence, so I still don’t see what your point is. I don’t think that idea is correct, so the question doesn’t become more nuanced (at least not that way).
“But precisely for that reason I’m unwilling to take a position on their compatibility or incompatibility with rationality.”
Well don’t then.
Non overlapping magisteria; Gould’s naive belief that the other side could be as gentlemanly, honest and decent as he was.
Check wikki.
I read too quickly, I missed the first bit.
“I’m defending the idea that there is no necessary connection between faith and statements of fact.”
But I didn’t say there was – that’s not what this discussion is about. You do spend a lot of time changing the subject, Merlijn, and it gets a little frustrating at times. Why can’t you just discuss whatever it is as it is instead of altering it to your preferred version?
“Well don’t then.”
I quite explicitly didn’t.
I don’t see at all how I’ve been changing the subject. At the beginning of the thread, you challenged me: “Come on, Merlijn – what are you talking about? Are you claiming that one can actually find out anything by means of religious faith? Not contemplate, ponder, muse on, speculate about, but find out?”
The long post which G and you responded to was intended as a clarification of my own views, seeing as I do not believe faith is an alternative to inquiry (nor have I, as far as I recall, ever claimed anything to that extent around here). I believe that, to make that clear, it was perfectly appropriate to distinguish my own views from a view which identifies faith with non-evidenced statements of fact. I don’t think I intimated at any point that you were holding such views.
So, again, I fail to see how my comments were in any way off-topic.
Oh, okay, that’s true, I did ask.
Beg pardon.
Nevermind, I could have been more explicit in that comment precisely what I was responding to.
chrisPer:
Reciting the Nicene Creed does not serve the purpose of proving that one holds “appropriate beliefs and shared social ideals.” Religious enthusiasms are a display, nothing more, and far too easy to fake. As exhibits, I present Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker, Ted Haggard, etc, etc ad nauseum. Anyone who is impressed by such a display is either a fool, or trying to fool others. This is why such displays are considered antiquated.
This is precisely why we do not trust Blair’s performance, or those that he cites in that performance. Behind this mask of shared values, we strongly suspect that there lurk values that we find utterly reprehensible.
Mark, it isn’t effective when its the frauds who are already exposed. Of course its easy to fake; but fakers are found out in the long run. Blair, for instance, is not a fake.
The posturing has a genuine social benefit, in the bigger picture, unrelated to the factual content. As I said before, it affirms the poseurs’ willingness to be judged by group values and gives their followers and peers information useful for decisions on trust and status – information needed for votes and comittment, but also for comparing and if appropriate adjusting individuals own moral boundaries.
Where it is untrustworthy is when the pose is more important than the underlying facts – eg in the marker opinions of the culture war.
If an expression of the compatibility of faith and reason is, as ChrisPer suggests, a marker of one’s position in the culture war – then I can only say that those who go on about the reconciliation or unity of faith and reason are ALWAYS those on the wrong side of the culture war: They are creationists and their apologists, enablers of all the worst epistemological AND MORAL crimes of religiosity, the willful feeders of self-righteousness. Tony Blair supports MORE faith schools, not fewer – and so he is on the side of promoting ignorance and undermining inquiry. What could be clearer?
“If an expression of the compatibility of faith and reason is, as ChrisPer suggests, a marker of one’s position in the culture war – then I can only say that those who go on about the reconciliation or unity of faith and reason are ALWAYS those on the wrong side of the culture war: They are creationists and their apologists, enablers of all the worst epistemological AND MORAL crimes of religiosity, the willful feeders of self-righteousness”
Personally I don’t see faith and reason as incompatible (and am glad to ChrisPer and Merlin’s comments above), neither am I guilty of any of the above crimes (that I’m aware of).
The primary limitation upon reason (and the scientific method) is that it requires repeatability of circumstance to function. The human cognitive function includes non-repetitive, non-linear processes such as intuition that can lead an individual to a personal experience or position by processes which are by definition irrational.
What the strict rationalist seems to say is that such understandings or positions are invalid because they cannot be reproduced or deductively reasoned.
To my mind, the positive and important role of faith (as opposed to the lemming type) is in maintaining an integrity of personal world-view by incorporating both rational and irrational personal experiences. In this respect, reason and faith are in no way incompatible.
I should add, that the original discussion is fairly meaningless – Tony Blair is a politician engaged in simple political posturing, and therefore no meaningful conclusion can be drawn.
Huskynut: You’re doing it again. I’ll just quote myself…
I am not seeking here to give a wholly negative definition of faith, such that any belief or attitude which demonstrates inconsistency with reason automatically must be faith. (This has been a persistent misunderstanding in this thread, though I don’t quite see how that misunderstanding is possible.)
Merlijn: Looking through the thread again, I do see one way in which you’ve sort of changed the subject, or at least avoided it. You never addressed my argument that this “trust” in the divine you talked about is just a variety of factual belief in disguise, a belief about the trustworthiness and beneficence of the purported divine entity. How is that trust not outright contrary to reason? How can it possibly be supported without bypassing either inquiry or fallibilism entirely? As OB said, ‘trusting’ a God or a universe that is at best indifferent to suffering is equivalent to ‘trusting’ the local sadist.
You say that you do not believe that faith is alternative to inquiry, but your basis for saying so seems to entirely rest on this claim that the particular form of faith you are articulating (and endorsing, I think), this trust in God stuff, is somehow separate from factual claims. Trust in persons is not in fact separable from the factual claims which underlie it, and you haven’t offered any reasons I can see to distinguish trust in the divine from other kinds of trust – so I remain unconvinced.
Huskynut and G, I actually think reason and faith are absolutely incompatible, in a restricted sense applicable (for instance) to scientific knowledge. I suggest that the incompatibility is not particularly important in areas of group social behaviour, eg politics, where action and ‘knowledge’ are more about trust and affiliation.
G, with respect, I hope this question is bigger than the ‘culture war’. It seems to me that the intellectual thoroughness and moral strength of many of the ‘liberal’ faction of that conflict are one of humanity’s greatest assets.
Hmm. I’m not sure what to make of your comment. I don’t think the ‘culture war’ is anything to take lightly – that is, I’m not sure what is “bigger.” The culture war is simply one unsubtle manifestation of the greater struggle of the deepest authoritarian and illiberal impulses of the body politic against human freedom writ large. The culture war here in America is simply a collective effort to stamp out the Enlightenment in its entirety. Although most people who oppose teaching science in schools and fight against gay marriage as if homosexuals were infant cannibals are not in fact Christian Reconstructionists who want absolute theocracy and enforcement of mosaic laws that might make the most ardent sharia advocate wince, people who hold exactly those positions are where much of the key money and leadership in the culture war comes from. The fact that they cannot possibly win such a battle does not mean they won’t do vast and irreparable damage with their efforts.
I think that stuff is kinda important. So I don’t really get what you’re saying, especially because you’re the one who brought up the culture war in the first place. I doubt we actually disagree all that much on the matters at hand, so I’m not so much disagreeing with what you’re saying as admitting that I just don’t have any idea what you mean.
I don’t know, G. I’m not at all sure faith is always based on underlying factual claims – especially if “factual” is understood as implying some kind of objective truth or falsehood. Note that I do not endorse such a kind of faith (as I think I made clear). To me, faith should be based on underlying existential claims which can be held more or less reasonably – even if the kind of faith that builds on it is in and of itself incompatible with reason.
I think there’s some ambiguity in the statement “faith is (in)compatible with reason”, though, and ChrisPer hinted at this in another way. Is (in)compatibility taken to mean that the tools of reason are to be applied to all of the questions that faith relates to? If so, of course they are incompatible (a religion wholly based on reason would ipso facto not involve any faith). Or is (in)compatibility taken to refer to the reflective stance of the person holding various attitudes and claims? A fideist or a mystic would probably claim that reason is irrelevant, rather than corrosive, to his faith (and vice versa). Does this mean the person in question is irrational?
Merlijn, of course there’s plenty of possible ambiguity or more like multiguity in statements about the compatability of faith and reason; of course faith can mean a lot of things (as Blackmore said in her piece); but my claim is that Blair was either addressing or relying on the most basic common understanding of the word – belief without evidence – and that that’s what needs addressing.
Unless you have good reason to think 1) Blair actually meant something different and 2) he genuinely expected his audience to understand him as referring to that something else, I still think your nuances are utterly beside the point. My point is about the harm done by that kind of public pious drivel, and it’s just irrelevant to note that the words can mean something else. I don’t dispute that, but it’s not the point.
Merlijn, I’m never sure when you’re obtuseness is deliberate or not. I said very specifically that the particular brand of faith you were discussing, insofar as it involved TRUST, seemed necessarily to rely on a particular kind of truth claim – the belief that God (however vaguely conceived) is trustworthy, is benevolent and cares about our well-being to some degree.
You say: To me, faith should be based on underlying existential claims which can be held more or less reasonably – even if the kind of faith that builds on it is in and of itself incompatible with reason.
As far as I can tell, this sentence agrees with what I was arguing EXACTLY, yet you claim to be disagreeing. I granted for the sake of argument that it might be possible to make a rational (or at least reasonable) existential claim about some kind of God (perhaps described in the Deist mode as a vaguely characterized universal intentionality/ consciousness – or whatever, it doesn’t matter because I’m not disputing it). But I then pointed out that TRUSTING such an entity goes quite a bit further, and that further step is incompatible with reason as I characterized it, focusing on the key criteria of inquiry and fallibilism.
Sounds to me exactly like a more or less reasonable existential claim which is built on in a way that is not compatible with reason. Am I missing something? Perhaps you balk at my use of the term ‘factual claim,’ but whether an entity (the deistic God in this case) has or fails to have a given property (trustworthiness, benevolent intentions towards us) simply is a factual claim by any definition of which I’m aware – albeit not a simple claim, and extraordinarily difficult to evaluate.
That difficulty is why I think this sort of claim is incompatible with reason: Firstly, this attitude or feeling of trust in God, and the underlying claim upon which it depends, do not seem very open to inquiry and fallibilism. Secondly, to the minor extent that it is possible to draw conclusions about a subject so vague, observation and investigation suggest a universe that is at best indifferent to our existence (bordering on hostile) rather than one governed by a guiding intellect that cares in the slightest about our interests and welfare.
As far as I understand it, fideistic faith is just the term for this sort of trust in God, and as such it does seem to rely on certain factual claims (God’s trustworthiness/benevolence) which cannot be arrived at or held in any manner compatible with reason. You still haven’t offered any reasons for me think otherwise, you’ve just introduced the term ‘fideism’ and metaphorically waved your hands about a bit.
If you don’t care to respond, then don’t. If you care to respond, then do. But it’s very frustrating when you claim to disagree and then state what appears to be agreement, and do it all in such a vague manner that I can’t be sure exactly what you’re addressing even though the arguments to which you are (in theory) responding have been very specific.
I have also been very specific about what I mean when talking about the incompatibility of reason and faith. Your introduction of the supposed ambiguity of whether faith refers to the process of arriving at beliefs or the “reflective stance” of the believer seems to ignore everything I’ve said, since I’ve repeatedly talked about faith as BOTH a means of arriving at AND holding beliefs. (It seems somewhat dubious to try to separate these too sharply in any case, although I might be easily persuaded otherwise if any motivation for doing so is given.) After all, fallibilism is more about revising beliefs and inquiry is more about arriving at them in the first place, so focusing on these two aspects of reason almost automatically speaks to both the means by which one comes to believe and one’s “reflective stance” towards beliefs. (Caveat: If I understand what you mean by the phrase “reflective stance,” which I might not since you introduced it without explaining it.) Yet I didn’t rely on that mere implication, and explicitly referred to both how one arrives at beliefs and how one holds them multiple times. If there’s ambiguity here, I’m beginning to suspect it’s because you keep introducing more ambiguity in response to everyone else’s attempts at clarity.
G.,
You seem to be seeing a contradiction where there is none. I did indeed state that “faith should be based on underlying existential claims which can be held more or less reasonably” – but notice the “should”. I have, in fact, explicitly agreed to your argument that faith, defined in this sense, entails a leap which cannot itself be rationally justified, though I added that I do not believe it follows that faith is necessarily impervious to reason. See comment 03:40:45. I’ll quote it:
“As for the argument you raise concerning trust in God and its inconsistency with reason: I think I agree that faith in that sense cannot be built on rational inquiry if it is to be anything corresponding to faith as commonly used. But I’m not sure at all if it is impervious to revision based on inquiry.”
So, I’ve explicitly agreed with an important part of your point: that if the incompatibility with reason of “trust” in God!
However, I am not sure if the concept of faith by definition involved factual claims – even if it is to be understood as trust. One of the reasons is that the concept of “factual claims” here seems to involve some kind of realism which I don’t think is universal among believers in their relationship to God (even though I personally hold to it). The descriptions of faith of Giles Fraser, Terry Eagleton, etc. which have been discussed in the past around here seem at first sight to be pretty much divorced from any kind of factual claim, or pretense to objectivity.
Finally, you write:
“Your introduction of the supposed ambiguity of whether faith refers to the process of arriving at beliefs or the “reflective stance” of the believer seems to ignore everything I’ve said, since I’ve repeatedly talked about faith as BOTH a means of arriving at AND holding beliefs.”
I wasn’t talking about faith there. Or even about the means of arriving at and holding beliefs. So I don’t see how it follows that I’ve been “ignoring” you. I’ll quote myself again:
“Is (in)compatibility taken to mean that the tools of reason are to be applied to all of the questions that faith relates to? If so, of course they are incompatible (…). Or is (in)compatibility taken to refer to the reflective stance of the person holding various attitudes and claims?”
In other words, the statement that “faith and reason are incompatible” can be taken to mean that the implicit beliefs held in faith (assuming for the sake of the argument that faith does necessarily involve implicit beliefs) are potentially subject to rational inquiry, that they are not actually so as long as they are held on faith, and that faith and reason are therefore incompatible. It can also be taken to mean that faith and reason cannot be integrated in a coherent set of different attitudes applicable in different domains. The latter would necessarily follow from the former, but it seems possible to me to hold that faith and reason are “compatible” in the latter sense, yet incompatible in the former sense – but this would involve a denial that reason is even relevant to religious faith.
No, Merlijn, you appear not to have been ignoring me or contradicting yourself. But when I *accuse* you of doing so, you are ever so much clearer in expressing yourself. I apologize for any irritation caused by the accusation, but I applaud the results.
Here’s why I was confused, and why I found what you were saying obfuscatory. You never explained any of the following before: …I am not sure if the concept of faith by definition involved factual claims – even if it is to be understood as trust. One of the reasons is that the concept of “factual claims” here seems to involve some kind of realism which I don’t think is universal among believers in their relationship to God (even though I personally hold to it). If you had ever said that part of your objection was about the realism implied by the characterization of beliefs about God, then I would have followed. But you didn’t, and I was confused. I did note that you appeared to be balking over the notion of a factual claim in some way, but you hadn’t clearly stated the nature of your disagreement and left me guessing.
I’m still a bit confused, but now I know what confuses me – because I don’t understand what faith is in the absence of realism. Faith acts are not beliefs on this view, but are they even thoughts? Are they just vague feelings which become incoherent when words are attached to them? In which case, I’d say the irrationality of faith isn’t so much in the content or character of the faith as in letting such vague feelings – or abstract thought-ish things which don’t even count as beliefs by any reasonable definition – influence anything one ever says, thinks, decides, or does.
I won’t pretend to be able to follow the anti-realist, touchy-feely gobbledy-gook spouted by Terry Eagleton or Giles Fraser on religion – but since I’ve never found anything respectable or defensible in any argument either of them has ever written on pretty much any subject, I’m not inclined to take their positions on this particular matter at all seriously. *shrug*
I think my other confusion simply follows from something you haven’t resolved for yourself. Seems to me your last paragraph expresses an extremely complicated conundrum for which you don’t yet have a solution. I am inclined to think you are right when you say, to paraphrase slightly, that reason is not even relevant to religious faith. But I don’t think I mean the same thing by that irrelevance that you do.
If reason is not relevant to faith, that means that people just look foolish in the end when they try to apply reasoned justifications to faith beliefs or in any way claim that reason and faith are compatible. And if reason is not relevant to faith, that means that any attitude or belief springing from faith is orthogonal to or simply not subjected to reason (inquiry, fallibilism) – and as such, that attitude or belief OUGHT NOT BE HELD AT ALL. Certainly, it ought not influence or shape beliefs, attitudes and decisions which have real-world consequences – and which ones don’t, in the end? (Ever the pragmatist, I.)
But I doubt you share that opinion of what the irrelevance of reason to faith entails. Or maybe you do? I’m often wrong when I guess which way you’re going to veer on one of these issues.
“And if reason is not relevant to faith, that means that any attitude or belief springing from faith is orthogonal to or simply not subjected to reason (inquiry, fallibilism) – and as such, that attitude or belief OUGHT NOT BE HELD AT ALL. Certainly, it ought not influence or shape beliefs, attitudes and decisions which have real-world consequences”
That’s exactly it. That’s the source of all our thrashing and fighting and resisting. If it’s all just [waves arms wildly in all directions] then it ought not to influence or shape beliefs, attitudes and decisions which have real-world consequences.
“But when I *accuse* you of doing so, you are ever so much clearer in expressing yourself. I apologize for any irritation caused by the accusation, but I applaud the results.”
Heh heh. For much the same reason, I don’t mind your occasionally sharp tone very much: I’m commenting here mainly because it helps me think. Challenging me to clarify my ideas helps that process.
I’ll respond to your points concerning Fraser and the possible irrelevance of reason to faith later. (You’re right that I haven’t resolved the mentioned conundrum for myself. As for very vague and antirealist conceptions of God: I may be slightly less negative towards them than you are. I can imagine they are personally and subjectively very fulfilling. But they’re not in any way compelling intersubjectively, and I personally have little use for them).
“I can imagine they are personally and subjectively very fulfilling.”
Oh well so can I. (Commenting here helps me think too.) But they can be a real problem intersubjectively – at least when they shade into realism or quasi-realism or ever so slightly realism – as they always seem to do once they go intersubjective. That’s the stumbling block, always (I think). The personally fulfilling can (and does) become the interpersonally confused and contentious.
And let’s not forget how often these educated types with the very vague, anti-realist, subjective, warm-n-fuzzy, etc. conceptions of God and faith turn around and use these idiosyncratic notions of theirs to defend everyone else’s conceptions of God and faith – no matter how precise, realist, objective, and frightening those other conceptions may be. Defending “faith” – faith in general, faith writ large, faith as traditionally defined and understood by pointing out how a tiny minority’s idiosyncratic perspective on religious issues is sometimes uses the same word – “faith,” with a very different meaning – is disingenuous at best. When someone like Fraser or Eagleton accuses Dawkins or any other atheist of “missing the point” or “mischaracterizing faith” or “not taking theology seriously,” they are pulling a transparent bait-and-switch. They MUST know that their own conception of God and manner of faith is very much different from the more widely held conceptions being criticized in very specific terms with very specific arguments by Dawkins (or Dennett, or Harris, or little ol’ me for that matter). They must know, but they still say otherwise, which makes them… less than entirely honest, methinks.
It makes me suspect that the faith they hold really is a lot more traditional than they let on: After all, if they really did hold such an abstract understanding of God and such a tenuous sort of mystical faith, then they wouldn’t be offended by arguments aimed at the more simple-minded and literal sorts of God concepts and dogmatic faith beliefs that they have rejected themselves.
Yeah. I seriously wonder how much the mere retention of the name ‘God’ for both has to do with that. If they really do hold such an abstract understanding of God, why do they retain the name that used to belong to the guy who walked in the garden and told Noah to build a big boat? Why do they insist on using the same name for both and then rail at us for objecting to the personal version? It’s very hard not to suspect it’s all pure camouflage and evasion. So hard that I don’t bother to try.
Oh I came here to say – belatedly, thanks for pointing out that Washington Post article, roger – hilarious.