Poor shivering baby
I think I can do a little to clarify what Julian has in mind (because I did a little background re-reading). I think it’s more interesting than these two recent articles might suggest (just as Russell said in comments).
I re-read the end of Atheism a VSI, because I did a comment on it in January 2007 and some of the issues are the same. My attention was snagged by a passage about Don Cupitt, who ‘finds himself under fire from Christians and atheists, who both think he is actually an atheist after all and should just admit it, but I think his attempt to save something distinctive from the wreckage of religious belief is admirable…’ Ah, thought I, so perhaps via Don Cupitt I can better pin down what Julian means by ‘what of value is left of religion once its crude superstitions are swept away.’ So I plucked my copy of What Philosophers Think from the shelf and found the interview with Don Cupitt and read it. He’s a non-realist about God, so one inevitably wonders well why bother then (and Julian did press him on that point) – but he did say some interesting things. The interview is in the archive, in case you have access.
‘I sometimes quote there the contrast between Sartre’s atheism and the reli gious attitude of a British philosopher like Ernest Gellner, who was certainly no theist and no religious believer. But he did tell me, “I have a religious attitude to life”. He wondered at life, he felt there was something there that deserved our respect and acknowledgement, just in the flow of life itself. He didn’t like either the Marxist or the atheist existentialist view of the individual human being as a purely sovereign positer of values and organiser of the world. One needs to have a sort of to-and-fro, a dialectic between the self and life. I have suggested that in today’s thinking the word “life” has taken on much of the religious significance that the word God used to have.’
When you strip away from religion all the excess baggage Cupitt believes needs removing, this seems to be at the core of what remains. Cupitt describes this attitude as ‘love of life, a kind of moral responsiveness to existence, no more than that, trying to get away from a rather aggressively masculine, Sartrean imperialism of the will.’
I wouldn’t call that religious, and I don’t think religion has a monopoly on it – but I can at least see what Cupitt is getting at. ‘A kind of moral responsiveness’ – that does describe something (in my view) even if I don’t agree that the something is religious.
I wondered in what sense religion could still be a source of values if we accept that all values are human-made…’We don’t just think up our values and impose them on experience. Rather our thinking is always prompted by things out there, persons who think for us. It’s no accident that celebrity endorsement and celebrity opinion is nowadays needed for English people to take any idea at all seriously. We do things by various kinds of proxies, symbols and ideas. Very few people are purely sovereign and autonomous creative thinkers in a post-Cartesian individualist way. Most of us work through myths, through other people, through values derived from religion.’
Okay – now that I get. I have said here, some time in the past, that I can see the value of the idea of God as an externalization of the idea of goodness or of being good. Thinking of God not with fear as a punisher but with love and emulation as someone who simply wants humans to be good – kind, generous, forgiving, helpful – that I can understand. All the more so of course if it’s a non-realist God.
The trouble of course is that so many believers think of God’s idea of goodness as something horribly different from kindness – but that’s another story.
‘So I want to say,’ he continues, ‘religion supplies us with poetry and myths to live by and human beings need stories to live by. Because our existence is temporal we’ve always got to construct some kind of story of our lives and that story, to my mind, needs to have a religious quality. So I don’t think any religious beliefs are literally true, but I think they’re all existentially or morally useful, or a great many of them are.’
Religion without doctrine, religion without creed, religion without belief in another, spiritual world, distinct from the world we live in – that is what Cupitt is striving for. Is religion without all these things still religion? The question bothered me more before meeting Cupitt than after. Whether you call it religion or not, Cupitt is trying to show us the precious baby sitting in the now rather dirty bath water of traditional religion. What we call it is neither here nor there; what matters is whether or not we should be saving it.
Well there you go. (That’s the final paragraph of the interview.) That’s exactly it. It’s a nice baby, but alas it’s not the only baby, and we’re not sure that the only way to get at the baby is through the dirty bath water, and so on. Julian himself doesn’t seem all that convinced. I’m not at all convinced but I can at least see what Cupitt is getting at. That’s something.
It’s interesting to observe the trajectory of Cupitt’s books as they move from 1985’s “Only Human” to the most recent I’ve read, “Life, Life” (2003). The secularization becomes more and more pronounced as he recognizes that the words “God” and “life” must become (and in his mind have already become) cognate for religion to be relevant to contemporary western life.
Sometimes he’s convincing. Other times he just seems to be trying to out-Wittgenstein Wittgenstein and making a po-mo mess of it.
His biggest flaw, to my mind however, lies in the fact that his thinking can only be applied to a certain segment of the educated religious West while completely ignoring the chilling religious realities that beset the rest of the world.
Based on the article, I don’t disagree with Cupitt, but I don’t think his description is representative of what the loudest and most politically powerful “religious” groups want or are up to.
The baby is besides the point, in a way, because the people who want to save it are free to do so. The only people who would get in the way of baby-saving are the bathwater advocates (who don’t like the concept of “god” represented by the baby). By fighting the pro-bathwater folks, you end up helping those who would save the baby anyway.
Yeah. That’s another angle I thought of earlier, and want to murmur a few words about. It occurs to me it’s really not the ‘foghorn’ atheists who prevent these serious discussions about what to salvage, it’s the theists – because we feel inhibited about perhaps hurting their feelings etc etc. If all that gets desensitized by being hauled out of the closet – maybe discussion really could be more free.
And what Brian said, of course. Fine for us; not so hot elsewhere.
I haven’t come across Cupitt before, but I am always suspicious of people who want to redefine the word ‘God’ so they can carry on calling themselves theists.
If what they mean when they say the word ‘god’ isn’t what everyone else takes it to mean, then they’re not really theists.
Postmodernists use a similar trick. They use the word truth as a synonym for ‘belief,’ and then make utterly trivial statements that sound daring and transgressive to the uninitiated.
I’m with you, OB. What the heck is distinctively “religious” about this attitude towards life in the world that Cupitt is talking about? In a way, such a definition of “religious” is every bit as problematic as the ever-sliding and perpetually equivocated definitions of “God” that have occasionally been subject to some critical analysis in this blog. I think it is also potentially every bit as much of a bait-and-switch – perhaps not used as such by Cupitt, but available for such deceptive uses by others.
Mind you, I say this as someone who has repeatedly made the distinction between religion and faith, and has asserted on many occasions that “faith” as such is the real problem, not religion. Religion without faith is one thing: Buddhism, most strains of neopagan practice, “Westernized” Taoism, Unitarian Universalism – all these are religious traditions whose adherents generally eschew faith beliefs. They are also religious traditions which an atheist might be – and many atheists are – perfectly comfortable participating in. But what Cupitt is talking about seems to comprise rather less than any of these religious traditions: It is “religion” that seems to lack anything whatsoever that is recognizable as distinctly religious. Using the word “religious” in this manner is ridiculously ripe for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and misconstrual.
Or perhaps I am missing Cupitt’s intent, and what he really wants is more religious traditions – Christianity, for example – to evolve towards non-faith-based versions like the aforementioned Buddhism etc. Certainly there are some radical liberal theologians who are towing the same line, e.g. John Shelby Spong.
Of course, people with such conceptions of religion (non-realists about God and so on) would not – or at least, should not – see themselves as the targets of the criticisms formulated by any of the published atheists Julian Baggini has been trashing lately: In fact, if they actually read the books in question, they would no doubt find some of the arguments against faith they make themselves. I don’t see how passionate, outspoken atheists are anything other than allies in the non-realist theologians’ fight against everything that is most problematic in traditional religion. Apparently, neither does John Shelby Spong: “I welcome the attention that serious atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are offering the world at this moment through their books. They are bringing what I regard as a deserved criticism and a necessary correction to what Christianity has become in our generation.” [cite]
If Julian Baggini is so keen to preserve whatever it is that’s good about religion, perhaps he should base his impression of the “New Atheists” more on what people with the same agenda (like Spong) have to say about them and less on irrelevancies like their book titles and the bleatings of idiots like Madelaine Bunting and Mark Vernon.
“I don’t see how passionate, outspoken atheists are anything other than allies in the non-realist theologians’ fight against everything that is most problematic in traditional religion.”
No, quite. Julian didn’t offer any reason for thinking so in that piece, either. People just seem to assume that’s the case, but I don’t see why.
I have a friend who calls himself a religious atheist. When asked what that means, he explains that he has a sense of the sacredness of all things, that he has mystic or transcendent experiences, although he does not connect them to any being called God. He’s also in favor of abortion rights, gay marriage and legalized marihuana. Fine. But he’s not really religious in the normal sense of the word: he goes to no Church; he recognizes no Deity. As to Cupitt’s love of life having something to do with God, depending on their life experience, people see life in different ways. Nietzsche also affirms life, which he associates with the God Dionysius, but life for Nietzsche is the will to power, self-affirmation.
“‘So I want to say,’ he continues, ‘religion supplies us with poetry and myths to live by and human beings need stories to live by. Because our existence is temporal we’ve always got to construct some kind of story of our lives and that story, to my mind, needs to have a religious quality. So I don’t think any religious beliefs are literally true, but I think they’re all existentially or morally useful, or a great many of them are.'”
There are no criteria for belief in science and philosophy. There is just probability assignable in some way that a proposition is right. I think we all have beliefs, but the difference between a religious person and a non-religious one is in readiness to discard a belief if it is unsustainable rationally. But as people without an operating system can be very fragile, I no longer challenge peoples’ religious views; though I did in my teens, when I was trying to work out an operating system of my own.
I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, but not that Christ will return: tomorrow or ever. The Christians I know would agree that Christ proabably won’t return tomorrow, but that some day he will, they hope.
We believe what we want to believe, and the propositions that we would like to believe are true. So we believe what we like to believe as well, as a “story”.
It looks to me as if ‘religious’ in this milksop sense means nothing more than ‘not being a self-obsessed arsehole’. Since we already have a perfectly good phrase for that, why do we need to label it with a word that also covers people whose main goal in life seems to be to drown as many babies in their dirty sectarian misogynistic fanatical bathwater as possible?
I’m not defending Cupitt’s non-realist position – though I think it’s a lot more highly developed philosophically than Spong’s – and I think he sometimes gets bogged down in ideas that suggest that everything is just language anyway, and that science and religion are really equivalent from this point of view.
However, it’s not simply a milksop version of religion. It’s much more subtle than that, and it’s not trying to pull a fast one on unbelievers. What it tries to do, arguably, is to preserve something valuable in types of experience, both personal and communal, that seem accessible only to those who somehow perceive a transcendent dimension in human experience.
Einstein was very much like this, and spoke about the awesomeness, not only of the universe, but of the ability of the human mind to comprehend, as he thought, something of the truth of what is really out there. (That’s why he had so much trouble with quantum mechanics, because he thought it diminished the universe by making what we say about the universe dependent on human cognition.)He believed in Spinoza’s god, and Spinoza’s god is a very elegant and beautiful determinist system of which we, in some sense, are mere effects.
But neither Cupitt nor Einstein were self-obsessed, in the way suggested by Dave, nor are they trying to redefine ‘god’ in a disingenuous way. What they are trying to do is to account for experiences that they believe are valuable, in language that is in some sense totalising, and that is not readily available in everyday discourse.
Having said that, however, I do not think that this necessarily picks out something that is uniquely religious, but it is something that may be provided by religion for those who are intensely self-aware in certain ways. I would suggest that there is probably something worthwhile examining here, but I suspect that the experience and its value are quite independent of religious belief. In fact, I suspsect that it is more accessible to those who do, in some sense, live at the margins of religious believing, people like Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, the Buddha, Eckhart, and so on.
The trouble with giving too much respect to traditions which have maintained the remote possibility of such valuable experiences is that you get a lot of dirty water along with the baby, and since the experiences in question are totalising, the political ramifications of institutionalising these experiences is almost always disastrous.
When Julian says atheists should acknowledge what is true about religion, I don’t read him as saying that religion delivers truths that aren’t available elsewhere. If he though there were such uniquely religious truths, then I take it he’d stop being an atheist. He’s just saying atheists should recognize whatever common ground they have with religious people.
One bit of common ground, I would think, is the idea that there’s objective right and wrong, good and bad, “out there.” Some atheists do believe that (I do), and that’s an idea to be found in religion–maybe even all religions. The point is not to thank religion for giving us this amazing idea, but just to recognize areas of agreement.
By the way, it’s not true that “the new atheists” never countenance truth on the other side–Dawkins does say some very nice things about Christianity in TGD, so if there’s a tendency to ignore truth, there are exceptions.
Jean,
I think most of us do recognise those areas of agreement. I have never met an atheists who thinks religious people don’t believe in an objective morality. It is religious people who like to tell us how atheism leads to nihilism – or even nazism!
Jean: Does Julian say ‘atheists should acknowledge what is true about religion’? Not in that column that sparked this discussion: he said ‘Intelligent atheism rejects what is false in religion, but should retain an interest in what is true about it.’ That’s a horse of a very different colour, isn’t it? (Though I agree with OB’s earlier comment that ‘true’ is a troublesome lexical choice.)
I often wonder if the reason religionists can’t fully appreciate the transcendent in the awe-inspiring, scientifically apprehended universe without a god is because they don’t particularly cotton to the idea that they can’t be around to witness it forever? Otherwise, I’m convinced they’d have no trouble sourcing morals, purpose and knowledge to the human alone.
And this need for “story”…I enjoy stories as much as anybody but can’t believe I’m alone in finding the stories told by religion to be deeply unsatisfying at best and repulsive at worst.
My main point was to suggest Julian is just urging that truths in religion be countenanced, not that there are any truths “unique” to religion. I think that’s what he means…since really, how could an atheist think there are truths “unique” to religion?
The next issue is what’s true. I was just saying what I take to be true–that there are answers to moral questions. “Out there” is just a metaphor. I mean that I’m a moral realist, not a moral relativist. I’m happy to say things like: it’s wrong to discriminate against gays in employment. FGM is wrong. Prohibiting girls from going to school is wrong. Etc. etc.
Of course, some atheists are relativists or skeptics about moral truth, so if they’re going to follow Julian’s advice and recognize the truth in religion, they’re going to have to find something else. In fact, they may find nothing. But for my part, I can find something.
outeast–I don’t see where my paraphrase of Julian goes wrong. Perhaps you can explain.
Well, all these terms such as “relativist”, “realist”, “irrealist”, “subjectivist”, “cognitivist”, “non-cognitivist”, and so on are incredibly slippery. E.g., try to get any two philosophers to agree on what David Hume’s meta-ethical position was!
There are certain kinds of vulgar relativism that I oppose – as I know Ophelia does – but I do think that morality is a human construction and that there’s some slippage between what it’s constructed from and what gets constructed. Thus, all these claims such as “Torturing puppies is wrong” are actually, strictly speaking, short-hand for something more complicated – and sometimes, when discussing a very difficult issue, it might be necessary to try work out what the “something more complicated” actually is. To the extent that most people (and, historically, most philosophers) would deny the “something more complicated” bit, they are in error – so say I and J.L. Mackie (and Joshua Greene, and Richard Garner, and so on). In that sense, Mackie and I (and the others) are error theorists or moral sceptics.
But we moral sceptics don’t have too much trouble making practical moral judgments, any more than we have trouble making, say, aesthetic judgments, where it’s pretty much uncontroversial that there’s a “something more complicated” implicitly going on.
Angelina Jolie is beautiful (even though a hippopotamus-shaped intelligent Martian makes no intellectual error in failing to think so) and killing people and eating them is morally wrong (even though a human-hunting intelligent Martian makes no intellectual error in failing to think so).
I do hope this will not now turn into a thread about whether Angelina Jolie is a good example of beauty. Maybe she’s not, but pick whatever example you like.
Russell: Metaethics confuses me, so I’ll ask some confused questions. You say there’s something about human nature which leads to moral judgments.
Maybe. But there’s something about human nature which leads to judgments that I would not consider moral too, like enslaving others, exterminating whole ethnic groups, raping women. So how do you know which judgments which derive from human nature are good and which are bad? I suspect that a long cultural tradition, which includes Christianity, Judaism, the Enlightenment, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, shapes our current ethical judgments, but that another cultural tradition (and those traditions exist), based on human nature, could affirm that female genital mutilation and slavery are
good. I’m not justifying either slavery or female genital mutilation: I consider them to be wrong, but I suspect that I consider them to be wrong because I belong to a cultural tradition which teaches me that they are wrong.
In being committed to moral truths, I think it’s open to me to have all sorts of different ideas about the nature of these truths, and whether they’re reducible to other truths, or irreducible, whether they’re ultimately based on agreement, or..or..or…lots of possibilities.
But there seems to be a very basic difference between thinking it’s really either right or wrong to stop girls from going to school, and saying it’s a matter of personal opinion or cultural norms, or this or that. It’s very hard to work up any fervor about girls being kept at home if “really right” and “really wrong” don’t mean anything to you. Of course, the fanatics in Pakistan say it’s “really right” to keep girls at home and I say it’s “really wrong.” But we do agree on the “really” part of it!
Vot a good discussion, pip pip.
“Now that we’re having a discussion of what might be of value in religion, rather than worrying so much about what to say about Julian”
It was never (in my case at least) just that, exactly – it was more to do with Julian’s recycling that particular meme, and the meme itself, and the air of hostility or disapprobation that tends to go with it. It was that whole complex, which I find quite puzzling and interesting. To put it simply, I don’t really understand why Julian, being an atheist, is quite so irritated at other atheists who haven’t done anything all that obviously wrong (that I can see anyway). So that’s about the irritation as such rather than about Julian as such.
Jean: I suppose it depends on what you mean by “really”. Do you and the fanatics in Pakistan mean the same thing by “really”? “Right” and “wrong” mean something to me of course; I believe that my norms are the best ones, the ones that are right. What I don’t believe is that my norms are Platonic forms or inherent to human nature or written in Natural Law or those of any rational mind. I believe that my norms, which are essentially the same as yours, are worth struggling for, that a world where our norms were followed by everyone, would be a better world. This argument could get easily become circular, so I’ll stop here.
“What it tries to do, arguably, is to preserve something valuable in types of experience, both personal and communal, that seem accessible only to those who somehow perceive a transcendent dimension in human experience. Einstein was very much like this, and spoke about the awesomeness, not only of the universe, but of the ability of the human mind to comprehend, as he thought, something of the truth of what is really out there…What they are trying to do is to account for experiences that they believe are valuable, in language that is in some sense totalising, and that is not readily available in everyday discourse. Having said that, however, I do not think that this necessarily picks out something that is uniquely religious, but it is something that may be provided by religion for those who are intensely self-aware in certain ways. I would suggest that there is probably something worthwhile examining here, but I suspect that the experience and its value are quite independent of religious belief.”
Now…this interests me; it’s the bit in Julian’s interview with Cupitt that interested me. I think I get it – I think I know what’s meant, and I think I have at least a little of that tendency myself – and one thing I wonder is whether I’m wrong about that: whether what I’m thinking of is qualitatively different from what Cupitt has in mind.
Because I don’t think of it (in my case) as transcendent, exactly – I would call it perhaps intensity, or attention, or awareness, or all those. Intensity in the Keatsian sense. (And if I remember correctly, James Mill particularly disliked the Romantic use of ‘intensity’…) Or those plus awe, or wonder. It goes (in my case, again) with certain kinds of…what to call it without sounding pretentious…just certain kinds of intellectual novelty. Learning new stuff about evolution and the human mind, for instance (I’ve just been reading William Calvin on that, also Melvin Konner, also coincidentally about the Iceman). I dunno, maybe transcendent is the right word – it certainly transcends me, and that’s a start. It also goes with just trying to pay the right kind of attention – to bald eagles, to the stars, to Indian miniatures from the court at Jodhpur, to Wordsworth – to whatever. But I don’t know if that is perhaps too pedestrian and plodding and earthbound to be what Cupitt has in mind.
No, I don’t think that is “too pedestrian and plodding and earthbound to be what Cupitt has in mind.” In fact, I think that is precisely what Cupitt has in mind. He wants to think of religious consciousness as purely human and purely immanent, and the transcendence just is the intensity with which life is lived, I think. He talks a lot in his later books about solarity, by which he means living like the sun, living fully by burning up, in a sense. Instead of trying to live within the bounds of doctrine, one lives by letting go, and floating freely, as he puts it somewhere, ‘upon contingency’s open sea.’
“I suspect that I consider them to be wrong because I belong to a cultural tradition which teaches me that they are wrong.”
Which is true enough, but you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) stop there. You can also give reasons. Your reasons are better than the reasons that defenders of slavery can offer. They’re not Absolute reasons, but they are better ones.
He’s something of a Romantic then, perhaps. Immortality Ode type of Romantic.
But if that’s it, I really do think a better word is needed. ‘Religious’ isn’t really it…
Attentive perhaps, except it sounds so dull. ‘Mindful’ is close but it has that New Agey ring.
Immortalityodeish. How’s that? Catchy, yes?
Oh, distinctly something of a Romantic, but I don’t think mindful would do for him. Immoralityodeish doesn’t quite work either! Besides, it’s not intimations of immortality, but intimations of mortality that gives life its intensity.
I think for Cupitt reclaiming the word ‘religion’ from religions was a lifetime’s project. He still thought it had a purpose, and that it said something that nothing else could say, in English (and perhaps German too), anyway.
At first he thought Christianity could be reformed, but that is no longer possible, but he still did, still does, I think, believe that something like religious consciousness is possible and valuable. I tried for several years to make this work in practice, but, in the end, the cruelty of belief got in the way, and was unltimately insurmountable.
I think belief must inevitably get in the way of reform, which is precisely why I think it is necessary to hold religions up to severe and perhaps outspoken scrutiny. Because, besides having things that are possibly of value (it would hard to develop such long traditions without throwing up things of value) they are also exceedingly dangerous. What I do not understand, while understanding that there may be things of value in religion, is why people like Blackburn and Baggini do not see how dangerous a force religion is in the world today, and how necessary the critique of religion and religious authority really is.
Oh, I think Blackburn does, despite that recent piece in the Times Higher. And I think I think Julian does, too, but for some reason which I don’t grasp, he also thinks ‘new’ atheists are terribly objectionable. The reason I don’t grasp Julian’s reason is, frankly, he hasn’t stated it clearly. I wonder if he thinks it’s so obvious that everyone will know without being told. If so, he’s wrong…it isn’t.
Would something as simple as living in the moment be a religious experience then? You know, the sort of thing experienced while immersed in an activity like sports or playing a musical instrument. The inner monologue shuts off, your consciousness is quiet but intensely aware, and muscle memory and instinct / training take over.
I’ve discussed these moments with some whitewater enthusiast friends and it often gets referred to as a zen-like experience. Even though the discussions always seem to take a mystical tone I have never equated them with sort of religion that the “new atheists” discuss.
I have no problems with seriously introspective theologians trying to salvage something of value from their traditions. Heck, I don’t even mind the wooly headed talk around the campfire after a hard day on the river. It’s the politically active kook who wants to use their holy book as a blueprint for running my country who seems the first priority to me.
Thankfully they have lost some momentum in the past several years, but until they are less of a threat I don’t think a softening of tone is advisable. Since the people who would use a holy book to guide us claim its capital T Truth as justification, I’m all for questioning that truth as often, and as vocally as necessary.
Ophelia, Julian’s on the road all the time, hearing what the masses say about the new atheists. I wonder what he hears. I did listen to one of his talks recently (one in Glasgow, I think). It seemed like the whole panel and audience were cheerfully irreligious, so that didn’t help me understand “the backlash,” if such there be. I do think it wasn’t such a great idea for Julian to hitch his wagon to Madeline Bunting’s column. It was full of nonsense–like how you can commit yourself to beings without being expected to take a stand on whether or not they exist. Faith is about trust, not believing propositions. Ugh. Next thing I’ll be trusting the wood nymphs behind my house, if I take this stuff on board.
I can give reasons, and our cultural tradition is the only one that values giving reasons, which is another reason in its favor, although that’s another circular argument.
Grendels – that’s ‘flow’ – which I think is a slightly different thing, though a very good thing. There could be overlap though (I’m guessing) – having the one experience could lead to the other.
I guess one reason I’m not sure my version measures up to Cupitt’s is that it’s not tricky in the way that flow is – so maybe it’s not profound enough. I don’t have to get into a state, I just decide to look closely at a flowering branch or whatever it is. It’s deliberate and self-initiated.
Then again, though, the learning new stuff thing is more tricky and maybe more flow-like, so maybe that fits.
Sorry; babbling.
Jean – yeah, I wonder who all these censorious people are that Julian meets on t’road. Maybe he’ll meet a nicer crowd now that he’s a philosopher in residence.
What I don’t understand is why people like Cupitt & Spong & various others try so hard to keep using words like “religion” and “God” and (FSM preserve me!) “spiritual” when the definitions they put forward are so very deeply at odds with the most prevalent conceptions of those words. (Although “spiritual” in particular is such a watered down mis-mash concept that I suppose nothing is at odds with it – but that makes the problems worse, not better.) Dogmatists aren’t going to be persuaded to drop their dogmatism by such equivocations, and rationalists/skeptics aren’t going to thank them for spreading confusing and giving cover to the cleverer dogmatists who exploit such equivocations in defense of their dogmas.
You cannot “rescue” concepts from the people who own them: Traditional believers (Christian, Muslim and otherwise) vastly outnumber thoughtful theologian/mystics/non-realists about God who eschew faith and belief as essential to religion, and the probably always will. Their practices and their use of those words (God, religion, etc.) are always going to define those words. Rick Warren’s latest dishonest book concealing rigid dogmatism as something more flexible and lovey-dovey is always going to sell more copies and have more cultural impact than the abstruse works of faith-rejecting liberal theologians. If you must carefuly re-define a word EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU USE IT in order to combat the way damned near everyone else uses that word, you’re not reclaiming ro rescuing anything – you’re sowing confusion and repeating yourself needlessly. Find some new words and phrases to express these concepts you think are so bloody important if you want to make any headway in spreading them!
[Just don’t ask OB for help with the new vocabulary. Immortalityodeish indeed! ;-) ]
Seems to me that the general idea here is a kind of positive existentialism; not the existential angst of Sartre focused on human isolation, but an instead an existential engagement with human society and the wondrous complexity and richness of the natural world of which we are only one small part. There is nothing particularly religious in this, although it is one part of what religions can (sometimes) encourage.
Or ‘not being a self-absorbed arsehole’…
Drat! Can’t even quote myself properly: ‘..self-obsessed…’
I can give reasons, and our cultural tradition is the only one that values giving reasons, which is another reason in its favor, although that’s another circular argument.
Amos, this is historically false. I’d recommend reading Amartya Sen on the topic, it’s quite fascinating.
Dogmatists aren’t going to be persuaded to drop their dogmatism by such equivocations, and rationalists/skeptics aren’t going to thank them for spreading confusing and giving cover to the cleverer dogmatists who exploit such equivocations in defense of their dogmas.
I think the problem with this is that the world isn’t divided into dogmatists and skeptics. Most people are somewhere in between, and comfortable with living in the world of equivocation. Equivocations seem to help them get their sense of “spirituality” or “transcendence” or what-have-you without wedding them to noxious practices and beliefs.
Every time I read Cupitt I get the same mental image. If one paragraph is full of feathers and quacking, the next one will be denying the existence of ducks.
I had read the ten page interview with Cupitt in What Philosophers Think and wasn’t impressed enough to seek out any of his own writing. This discussion has made me reread that interview, and I am still not getting him.
He acknowledges that some systems of thought correspond better with experience, but denies empiricism and correspondence theory of truth? I’ve never understood how admitting that the theoretical framework that I view the world through colors my perceptions is supposed to negate empiricism or correspondence.
Don’t the fairly obvious examples of previous paradigm shifts show that some systems of thought not only correspond better with experience than others, they also have mechanisms for correcting flaws in their own framework?
G: “Find some new words and phrases to express these concepts you think are so bloody important if you want to make any headway in spreading them!
“[Just don’t ask OB for help with the new vocabulary. Immortalityodeish indeed! ;-) ]”
I disagree. ‘Immortalityodeish’ is a word well suited to the times, distinctive, not in common use and therefore likely to have a long run without ambiguity. I say ‘well suited to the times’ because thanks to the ^c and ^v functions on the keyboard, you don’t even have to learn to spell it. (Eat your hearts out, Luddites!)
All we need now is for OB to provide us and the world with a definition, which I am sure she could do while dialling a mobile phone while juggling pots on the stove while the JWs are back knock knock knocking on the front door. [ ;-) ]
There is another aspect to “Find some new words and phrases to express these concepts you think are so bloody important if you want to make any headway in spreading them!” but I’ll have to leave that for later. The JWs are back…
I think I should call myself Beowulf in defence, but I tend to agree with Grendel’s Dad regarding Cupitt’s theory of truth. He got all tied up in structuralism and post-structuralism and that sort of thing back in the late eighties and early nineties, and he never quite recovered.
So, he’s been known to say some wacky things about science as a purely linguistic pursuit, and put religious utterances in the same class with scientific theories. In some sense, for Cupitt, everything is language, so he out-Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein.
But you can cancel through by all of that, and then you can see that he has some fairly brilliant things to say about religious language. But he’s never really developed an epistemology or truth theory, so some of his stuff seems very campy. But as I say if you overlook some of the discrepancies, you can see that he has some fairly important insights into the way religious language functions. He tends to think that all language functions in that way, but there, I think, he is quite wrong.
Jenavir: I’m not sure what part of my affirmation you believe to be false. I’ll guess and I’ll modify my remark to say that our culture is the only one which gives reasoned explanations for ethical decisions and above all, the only one which considers metaethical questions through reasoning. By “our culture”, I include people throughout the so-called 3rd world who are educated in Western ways of thinking, including Mr. Sen and probably, most, if not all, of the educated classes of countries like India and China. OK?
footnote for Jenavir: I assume that all cultures have some kind of Talmudic ethical reasoning about what the Holy Book or what tradition says, but as far as I know, it’s only Western culture, in the broadest sense of the word, which questions the authority of the Holy Book and of tradition.
“If one paragraph is full of feathers and quacking, the next one will be denying the existence of ducks.”
Line of the week! If not month!
amos, you really should read Sen on the topic then. India and China have indigenous strains of rationality.
You can probably just search for him from here – I know I have a link to that well-known TNR piece called ‘It’s Not Just the West You Know’ or something like that.
I couldn’t find it searching your site, but I’ll try Google. Thanks.
Yeah, the Carvakas rule.
OB said: “They’re not Absolute reasons, but they are better ones.”
Until such a time as I write a book on meta-ethics, which is looking less likely each day, that will have to be a place marker for it.
Sen’s book is called The Argumentative Indian. It was not well reviewed everywhere. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=22&storycode=198776
Not being an expert on Indian history or culture, I’ll not make any more affirmations on the subject.
I think it’s this – “East and West: The Reach of Reason,” which was in the NYRB; a shorter version was in TNR.
I recommend his book The Argumentative Indian too.
OK Eric, I take your point about oddities in one area not invalidating what could be good ideas in another. And I think that understanding the different uses of language by different thought traditions would eliminate, or significantly reduce, some of the ‘talking past each other’ that is so prevalent in these discussions.
I guess that my “Aha!” moment came a while back while talking about some people protesting one of the Harry Potter movies. They stated that they didn’t “believe” in magic in a way that didn’t make sense to me in the context. For them, not believing didn’t mean that magic didn’t exist but that it wasn’t something to, I don’t know, trust? Associate with? Support? Once I realized that they were using the word differently then I was able to at least understand their view.
Does Cupitt have any particular work you might recommend to an already daunting reading list?
Oh, by the way, no need to get all Beowulf here. The Grendel in my sig is seven year old Husky / Shepherd mix (best guess, came from a shelter), so if you go ripping her leg off I’ll be forced to alter my tone. ;^)
Thanks OB, I blush even more to admit how proud I was of that line already.
Grendel’s Dad. I’ll lay aside thoughts of blood and gore. :-)It’s really very hard to recommend a specific book by Cupitt. He has published so many! And he keeps changing all the time. His early Farewell to God, or his much later Emptiness and Brightness might give you a taste, and it will show how much he has evolved. I like the line about feathers and quacking and the denial of ducks too, and there is much in that. I fear he’s a bit like me, and tends to forget, sometimes, what he has written. For instance, in Mysticism and Modernity he speaks of mysticism in terms of cosmic eroticism, but then, much later, he denies that there is an erotic component to the love of God (God being, by this time, a way of speaking about religious consciousness).
The more I hear about Cupitt, the less inclined I am to read his work. And I think I’ll stick with my aversion to equivocating re-definitions of “religion” and “God” and so on. Recipes for cognitive disasters, every one of ’em.
And Jenavir: Just because one uses a binary distinction doesn’t mean one is dividing the world into two types of people. I’m quite aware that there are all sorts of people in the middle. But giving those people muddle-headed equivocations to allow them to preserve their bad ideas while pretending (to themselves and others) to have better ideas is no great achievement, and almost certainly isn’t the aim of Cupitt et al. Being comfortable with massive equivocation is a problem, not a solution.
Amos: I meant that historically, there have indeed been cultures outside the West that valued argument and criticism, including of the “holy book” (if they had a holy book, which not all of them did). Sen’s book is a good primer, though not perfect.
G.: quite true. But because of that equivocation, I don’t think introducing a non-realist view of “god” is necessarily as much of a wholesale redefinition of the term as you were saying. It’s more like pushing people to one of the two definitions they’ve been oscillating between.
Hmm. I’ll believe that when I actually meet someone vacillating between some non-realist definition of God and the ordinary notion of God.
Here’s why I’m skeptical: Lots of people seem to wander around between vague, incoherent, pantheistic or just plain nonsensical New Age-y conceptions of God (“God is just… God is Love, ya know? Universal love.”) and a conception of God with more ordinary and definite properties like being our Creator and omniscient and stuff, or perhaps even a pared-down Deistic version of the same (but still “real”). Few people – none in my direct experience, although I will take it as a given that some probably exist somewhere – vacillate between realist and non-realist conceptions of God. Vague or incoherent conceptions of God are simply not the same as Spong or Cupitt’s non-realist conceptions of God – although sometimes the latter are also pretty damned vague and border on utter incoherence, in my (rarely humble) opinion.
If there aren’t many people at all in the position you describe – and I don’t think there are – then the equivocation is still mostly harmful and rarely helpful in terms of moving people away from unsupported and unsupportable beliefs about God. Then again, I suppose there might be value in encouraging vague, confused, airy-fairy notions of God instead of definite notions of God. The former don’t do as much direct harm as the latter, I’ll grant you. But that just brings us back around to my oft-repeated argument that moderate believers, insofar as they validate and valorize “faith” as a way of (not) knowing, are definitely part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Which I don’t particularly want to re-hash here.