In Denial: Dionysian Christianity

I recently read an article from Leah Rosenzweig about her feeling of betrayal after learning that prominent members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church had committed horrifying sexual crimes.  Including one who had created the program in which she was a youth leader.

I understand the sense of betrayal.

Historically, because I entered the Catholic Church shortly before the sex abuse scandals in Boston were made public, I can almost feel her anger.  I shared it.

The first revelations of the sex abuse crisis left me quite angry, an anger I really didn't know how to process as a teenager.

Presently, it's a good thing that I've since learned how to process anger, because the recent investigation into sexual abuse and cover-ups in Pennsylvania have resulted in that profound anger and I becoming re-acquainted.

Like Leah Rosenzweig, the mercy of the Church toward Maciel looks to me like cowardice on this matter.  Not because the hierarchy was lenient with Maciel alone, but because it has been so lenient with so many child abusers, with those who groom teenage boys to be their paramours, and with those who violated their vows of chastity, whether with grown women or grown men.

Instead of dealing decisively to remove the wolves from the sheepfold, the shepherds in many cases simply re-located the wolves to happier hunting grounds where they could prey upon more of the sheep.

This isn't just a callous response.  It's a weak response, and it's this weak response that she rightly rejects.  Ultimately, it prompts her to leave the Church altogether, despite her sympathies for the Church and its members even during her college years when she left the Catholic faith behind.

She mentions that the sort of Catholicism she encountered was rather weak and seemed a bit un-Dionysian after her exposure to Nietzsche, and I wish that she had made this point a bit more strongly.  In perhaps a bit less of an Apollonian fashion, so to speak.

The practice of many Catholics here in the U.S. and other places in the West has indeed become rather weak.  Nietzsche would be appropriately appalled by it, as he was by the bourgeois Christianity of Germany in his day.

This bourgeois Christianity is resurgent now, but it's not always been the default way of being a Catholic Christian.  Catholic Christianity as practiced by the Saints (whether canonized or not) has been and continues to be the radical answer to the question, "Master, what must I do to have eternal life?"

This bourgeois Christianity of many Catholics today is not the Catholic Christianity of St. Francis of Assisi's radical commitment to poverty for the sake of loving God and neighbor.  Nor is it the Catholic Christianity of St. Dominic, the Canon of Osma who preached the Gospel as a barefoot itinerant priest who actually practiced what he preached.

This bourgeois Christianity is disconnected from the witness of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, those wild desert-dwellers whose spiritual advice is filled with boldness and strength.  It's disconnected from the passion for Christ and the deep knowledge of one's own sin that St. Augustine showed in his Confessions.

This bourgeois Christianity would barely recognize the boldly mystical and visceral theology of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, who laid down his life for the faith.  It's a sort of un-Dionysian Christianity not only in the Nietzschean sense of what it means to be Dionysian.

It is also un-Dionysian in the sense that it rejects the bold theology and martyrdom of St. Dionysius as unnecessary and perhaps a bit unnerving.  This weak, simpering "so secular they were almost cool" Christianity is not a Christianity worth having.

Indeed, it is barely any kind of Christianity at all.

Like Leah, I was formed in the tradition of this un-Dionysian and weak Catholic Christianity that is resurgent today.  I was very tempted to leave the Church to become a Buddhist, to do something more radical with my life.

To do something, interestingly, that she might see as more Dionysian, more life-affirming and exciting, to venture into an Eastern tradition so different from one's own and delight in it.  I decided not to do that, for reasons I've explained before.

I still feel somewhat drawn to that weakened Catholic Christianity.  There's an appeal in the kumbaya sensibility of that tradition, in the feelings of acceptance and community, a community that does not require much beyond being agreeable and...lukewarm.

But being lukewarm and comfortable in a community that easily accepts me isn't what I want to be.  It won't radically transform me in light of the Gospel message.  It won't bring me closer to the divine life of Love Himself.  There's no theosis in it.

I am glad that I found out that Christianity too is Dionysian as well as Apollonian, that to be Christian is indeed to be zealous in faith, to be radically committed to living a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the commandments of the one who loved us unto death.

The same One whom Peter denied three times, just as we often deny Him by our lives.

Lots of Catholic Christians are in denial.  Some in the hierarchy are in denial about the depth of their complicity in the sexual abuse crisis.  Others are in denial about the problems they have caused with their weak, simpering version of Christianity that is barely worth the name.

All of us are probably in denial about something that is holding us back from fully imitating Christ.

This is why we all need a Dionysian Christianity, a Christianity of radical witness to the Gospel to pull us out of our selfishness, a Christianity that reflects the insight gleaned from the wild asceticism of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, a Christianity that by our lives shows all the passion and humility of St. Augustine of Hippo.

We need the bold Dionysian Christianity of St. Francis and St. Dominic, who renewed the Church during dissolute times by living the Evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

We need a Christianity that shows the extravagance of Love, a Christianity that will not settle for anything less than full communion with the beloved, one that rushes in like a fool to find the eternal wellspring of Love.

We need the Christianity of St. Dionysius, who lived for mystical union with Christ and laid down his life for Christ so that he might find that mystical union.

Nietzsche's Asceticism - Nietzsche's Anti-Semitism - Nietzsche's Skepticism

Note:  The above image is part of the cover of my copy of Nietzsche's collected works.  See my Sources page for more information about which translation I used.

Fair Questions: Why are many Catholics in the U.S. so Protestant in their thinking?

This question was posed recently in a group I'm a part of, and I thought it was worth answering from my perspective because I'm a former Protestant who only very gradually became Catholic in his thinking.

One thing to note is that this is an issue that is not specific to Catholics.  Members of Eastern Orthodox or Coptic Orthodox congregations who grew up primarily in the U.S. often have the same struggle of trying to reconcile their deeply-ingrained and culturally-acquired assumptions that stem from Protestant thinking with the ancient Christian religious tradition which predates such thinking and is different from it at a paradigmatic level.

This is not even an issue that is specific to members of Christian groups.  Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, people who are part of various Indian traditions under the umbrella of Hinduism, and so on are often afflicted with this difficulty as well.  That said, I'm going to examine the situation of Christianity in particular.

We who were raised in America generally inherit a set of intuitions about the meaning of the word "worship" and the word "pray", the nature of human social hierarchies, the nature of our relationship with religion, the place of the Bible in Christian life, the nature of the Church, what it means to be a Christian, and so on.

Because the United States was heavily influenced by Protestant Christians in its culture, its theological language, its popular ecclesiology, its view of the Bible, and its view of human nature, these intuitions are often Protestant intuitions.

I wrote a fairly lengthy series about my own journey to re-examining and ultimately rejecting those intuitions, and that was not an easy process, given how basic many of them are to someone raised in the United States.

Hypocrisy and Truth - Necessity and Tradition - Scripture and Reason

For example, it took me quite a long time to shake the intuition that the Bible is the basis for Christian theological claims and truly understand that the Bible is a written record of early Christian theological claims.  I thought that the Bible was what gave Christianity the authority.  It turns out that Christian authority vested in the Church gave us the Bible.

It also took me many years to understand why my intuition that Mary's role as Queen of Heaven need not be emphasized was wrong, and to unpack the ways in which my American understanding of social hierarchy had unfairly prejudiced my view of the divine hierarchy.

I also had a defective understanding of my relationship to the Church.  I viewed the Church as something I could accept or reject on intellectual grounds, not as the Body of Christ in its earthly fullness to be loved as I love my own body, just as Christ loves the Church.

This intuition that turned out to be false isn't something I developed on my own.  I inherited it from an American culture that has largely agreed that attending churches is just a matter of individual preference in practice, even if in theory some of the congregations assent to the traditional ecclesiological view of the 1st-millennium Church that there is one true Church, and outside the one true Church of Christ there is no salvation.

In a similar way, there are many people in the United States who are raised Catholic and nonetheless take the typical post-Reformation view that leaving the Catholic Church to attend services with another congregation is just their personal choice.  It's not a schism or anything serious like that.  It's just a matter of doing what their conscience tells them.

And given this, it's not surprising that Americans don't see the Catholic Church as an authority to be obeyed, but rather an advisor on morality whose advice can be ignored, because the individual is the final arbiter of what is best for the individual.  The Church can't really be an authority over an individual, because the individual is the ultimate authority.

This American individualism is so deeply rooted in the psyche of most Americans that even the most traditional Catholics who strive for obedience to the Church can struggle with it, sometimes going so far as to set themselves against the Church for not living up to their individual standards.

While some might focus on the problem with Protestant theological language flattening the definitions of the words "pray" and "worship" (for good reasons), I am more concerned about the more deeply-rooted intuitions which make it easy for us to rationalize leaving the Church or rejecting Her teaching while still being attached to the Church for other reasons.

Intuitions like these are doing real damage to the Corpus Christi, as they motivate an increasing number to leave, many to dissent, and some to grumble against the Church for not doing more to strike against those who dissent.

Though it's interesting to consider how American culture tends to make even Catholics and members of other ancient religious groups accept intuitions at odds with how their religious traditions understand the world, it's mostly just sad to watch the Body of Christ breaking again.

Ut unum sint.

Related: The Protestant Intuition: Divine Gifts & Human Works

Note:  Above is a picture of Martin Luther's edited Bible translated into German.

Fair Questions: Why was atheism so appealing to me in college?

It was interesting to read this Atlantic article from 2013 and learn something that experience has already taught me: atheists often want a Christianity that they can respect, perhaps merely as as a worthy opponent, and possibly as a serious alternative to their own beliefs.

I can understand that desire.  I also prefer to find defenders of other viewpoints that I can respect because they're well-reasoned, take into account the relevant evidence, and build character when lived out.

Like the students interviewed by Larry Taunton, I took (and continue to take) the big questions seriously.  I had a lot of time on my night shifts while getting my first degree to ponder those big questions, and I still revisit them now that my schedule is less conducive to it.

I first encountered rational and compelling arguments for atheism in my philosophy courses and in online philosophical debates that I thought of as simply a good practice for critical thinkers.  But it wasn't just the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Omnipotence paradox, or the argument from inconsistent revelations, or the argument from parsimony which shaves God from the face of one's beliefs with Occam's razor that made me seriously consider atheistic claims.

These sorts of inductive and deductive arguments were worth wrestling with, and I did wrestle with them, but they weren't the primary driver of atheism on average so far as I could tell from my engagements with atheists.  I'll come back to that.

I was inclined toward atheism in college because it was simpler.  I was an instinctive reductionist, wanting to find the most comprehensive explanation put forward in the simplest terms.  Part of this was because, as I've mentioned before, I was a scientific realist.

The simplicity of the atheistic worldview, specifically the one bound by the epistemic limits of scientific methodology, was a natural fit for my inclinations at the time.  I thought that the accurate answers were the simpler answers that were still internally coherent.

Over time, I came to realize that, given the limits of human cognitive functions, it was very unlikely that the answers which I found to be simple and comprehensible were actually accurate answers.  I also realized that, because reality cannot be described accurately in terms of classical logic, using classical logic to demonstrate the existence or non-existence of God wasn't going to work.

So I abandoned the project of finding an argument or set of arguments that would settle the question of whether or not atheism was the correct position.  But this did not eliminate the question.  The intellect might be agnostic, but the heart must have an answer with which it can live and move.

Speaking of the heart, I found that many atheists brought up the Problem of Evil, and asked heartfelt questions about how a loving God could allow so much suffering to befall so many people.  This is a question that I, of course, wrestled with as well.

I thought that my own sufferings were rather important.  I wallowed in them.  I was so absorbed in looking at the darkness of my suffering and the sufferings of others that it was rare that I looked at the glorious light filling my life.  These sufferings seemed so large, and God seemed so distant while I focused on them.

Where was God?  Why was God allowing me to suffer so much?  Why was God allowing my friends and family to suffer so much?  Would a loving God allow so much suffering?

These are not new concerns and questions that should confuse Christians.  These concerns and questions should not be any surprise to the Christian who has read the Psalms or the Book of Job or lived a life in which a person's heart groans with anguish at all that must be endured for love.

It should surprise none of us that atheism is greatly appealing to those who believe that suffering is evil (because they believe that pleasure is a moral good).  If suffering is evil by nature (rather than just unwanted), then a God who causes or allows suffering which could be prevented is either evil himself, not a particularly powerful god after all, or just a polite fiction to comfort those who cannot bear the weight of the idea that their suffering is pointless.

And it should surprise none of us that atheism is greatly appealing to those who have been trained (like myself) to trust the scientific community to provide us with true beliefs about the world, to believe that the simplest explanations containing only references to physical processes are best, and to accept the assumption that all mysteries can eventually be fully explained by scientific investigation.

These are influences that affect many people in many countries, and we should expect that where those influences abound in the lives of any person, atheism will become more appealing.  I don't think that my experience with finding atheism appealing in college was all that unique.

It certainly should not have been unexpected.  I found atheism appealing for much the same reasons that others do.

Related:  The Gospel of Doubt

By Unknown - This image is available from the National Library of Wales You can view this image in its original context on the NLW Catalogue, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44920993


Note: This is called the Incredulity of Thomas, and it shows Thomas placing his hand in Christ's side, as do many of the works of art based on the events described in the New Testament.  The portion of the Gospel of John in which this event is related is the source of the phrase "doubting Thomas" in common parlance.

Waking Up Half-Asleep: Scientific Racism and Sam Harris

The latest controversy surrounding Sam Harris has been generated by his willingness to admit that he was wrong about Charles Murray, who earned great notoriety for his book The Bell Curve.  Others disagree, and continue to claim that racism is either Murray's motivation for the research and the policies he supports or something he conveniently ignores.

I think the question of Murray's views on race have been beaten to death, re-animated, and beaten to death again so many times that it's largely a futile effort to address it again.

What interested me more was the subject of scientific racism, and Harris' response to Ezra Klein's points about it.  You can see the transcript here at Vox if you prefer not to listen to the podcast version.



I want to look at a portion of the conversation and quote the transcript to address the issue of scientific racism:

Ezra Klein: Something you brought up a couple times is something I wrote in my piece, and I am actually very happy to talk about this. I say that the belief that African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites, and then also inferior in other ways, which I’m not saying you guys said, is our oldest, most ancient justification for racial inequality and bigotry. Do you disagree with that? When you look at American history, when you look at what we said at the dawn of this country and all the way through the 1950, the 60s, when I say that, am I wrong?

Sam Harris: In a sense you’re wrong. I agree with the spirit of it. I think you could say the Bible is just as much of a justification, the notion that the race of Ham came under a curse and that these races have a separate theological stature. You had Bible-thumping racist maniacs defending slavery and without any reference to science. That’s a great American tradition.

I think tribalism is at the bottom of it and perceiving other people who look different and sound different from yourself as ineradicably different. I think that is a problem we must outgrow, and I fully agree with the social concerns that follow from noticing how far we have to go in outgrowing that.

Ezra Klein: One of the things I detect in this conversation, this maybe gets to something we discussed that we would talk about later and maybe we’ve hit that point. Something I detect here is the idea that, and I want to think about how to phrase this carefully, because I want to do it without making you defensive, is that ideas can only fit into this lineage if they are being said with racial animus, if they are being said by someone who doesn’t like the people they’re talking about.

I think an important thing when we study the history of racism in this country is that it has always had a scientific wrapper. It has always been not something people thought they were doing because they were hateful, it was something they thought they were doing, because it was true.

This is the area where I think Sam Harris' tribalism (which Ezra Klein accused him of ignoring) is actually a factor.  Sam Harris has a fundamental commitment to science and scientific values.  He's a neuroscientist himself.  He's part of the tribe of scientists and pro-science public intellectuals.  He's gone so far as to claim that morality can be grounded in a scientific framework.

My sense is that Harris's self-perception is that he's taken his tendencies toward tribalism into account and mitigated those already.  Also, he doesn't pretend that no one has ever used science to support racist ideas.  He acknowledges this, albeit briefly.

I don't think the tribalism is a problem for him here in a straightforward and obvious way.  It's more roundabout, and by way of his views on religion.

Even very rigorous philosophers who regularly take into account their own biases, when they happen to be religious, can easily tilt the way they interpret the strength of the arguments against their religious views to avoid dealing with the full strength of those arguments.  I'm sure Harris is familiar with this process from long experience.

What I would suggest is that the same tilting of the way the strength of the arguments is interpreted is happening here.  The strength of the arguments regarding the extent to which the Bible was used to rationalize slavery in the U.S. is given a bit greater weight because Harris is committed to opposing religions generally and for that reason the various religious tribes (who generally oppose him).

At the same time, he is unlikely to weight the strength of the arguments regarding the extent to which scientific research was used to rationalize slavery and eugenics and so on in the U.S. so heavily because his view of science is that it is helping us leave those ideas behind rather than keeping us in those ideas as he believes religion does.

My view of the issue is that religious views rather than scientific views played a larger role in maintaining slavery, and that religious views rather than scientific views played a larger role in ending slavery (and the Jim Crow laws and segregation which followed) in the U.S.

It was much more the American moral sense formed by Christianity that motivated the change in views on the issue of slavery and the issues of Jim Crow laws and segregation.  The scientific evidence we have now does indeed support the view that traditional racial categories are not very accurate as a description of intra-species differences in humans, but this evidence was not yet well-established and popularized during the colonial era or the Civil War era.

What was well-established at that point were the Christian moral arguments for slavery and the Christian moral arguments against slavery.  And it was those religiously-motivated moral arguments that carried the day, and still inoculate us against a return to slavery.

Scientific research doesn't, by itself, produce moral progress in a society.  It's typically used in a self-serving way by both sides of any given controversial moral issue, but it's not what motivates societies to change.  And that's for a very simple reason: science is generally not what motivates people to change (religion is much more motivating), and it's the people who need to do the changing for societies to change.

Now, I would feel safe betting that Sam Harris would agree with me that people ought to be more motivated by scientific findings.  He and I would likely reach an accord quickly on that point. 

Certainly more quickly than an accord could be reached by Harris and Klein on the question of whether or not Klein's publishing of articles contra Murray and Harris poisons the space for debate on important issues.

I think it's probably true that Klein's behavior has contributed to poisoning the space for public debate on the policy implications of IQ score differentials, but only ever so slightly.  It was a poisonous space for debate long before Klein was involved, and I don't see his contribution being a very large one.

I would also say that Klein is dead wrong about the most ancient justification for racial inequality and bigotry being the belief that folks with dark skin are less intelligent than those with light skin.  The roots are deeper than that.  Bigotry based on physical characteristics is much older than any of the recorded history for the colonial era (or even the medieval era), and likely much older than any recorded history...period.

We need to look deeper for the roots of bigotry, and even slavery, which is older than any of the religious traditions or scientific findings that have recently been used to rationalize its continuance.  We can and should do this while still guarding against future uses of moral reasoning grounded in those religious traditions and scientific findings to bring slavery back or to continue other kinds of ongoing injustices.

I think Klein is exactly right, however, that racism in the United States has consistently had a scientific wrapper.  And that we ought to be skeptical of our ability to claim today that we can be reasonably sure that the scientific data showing differences in average IQ scores among populations represents a real innate difference in IQ due to heritable traits.

I can acknowledge that the data exists while remaining agnostic as to the exact causes and their implications (which I do).  This curious agnosticism with regard to the question would probably have been a better approach for many people who used scientific research to prop up their racism in the past or the people who continue to use it that way today.

I think we need to make sure that we are not waking up to the problem of racism, still half-asleep and stumbling around while unable to see that the same old pitfalls are still there.

It is probably better to give ourselves a chance to wake up fully before we attempt to leave our resting place too boldly, and then we can make our way more safely while avoiding those old pitfalls.

Sadly, I'm not sure any of us are fully awake at this point.

Fair Questions: What can we learn by living with different assumptions?

I had a discussion related to my previous post about the Slow Death of God (the story of former pastor Ryan Bell's year without believing in God).  One of my friends asked a good question pursuant to that discussion, and I want to address it more fully than I did in my brief response to him.





The question as posed is in two parts:

"Do you think that living for a year without God is a reasonable way to go about discovering the truth? One of your responses to your friends indicates that living out a certain way of life is a good way to confirm what one already thinks is true. However, is it a good or reliable method of discovering the truth?"

The first part of this question is asking whether Bell's experiment was a reasonable way of discovering the truth about whether God exists or not.  My short answer to that question is: No.

The second part of this question is asking whether it's a reliable way of discovering truth.  My short answer to that is:  Maybe.  It depends on what kind of truth you want to discover.

But why?

1.  Not all truths are falsifiable by experience.

For example, if I were to live for a year under the assumption that our Vice President, Mike Pence, is my best buddy who goes for beers with me at the local bar every weekend. That is something that could (and would) be falsified by my experience of life.  I've never met the man before, didn't vote for him, am not a member of his political party or a donor to it, don't have any friends who can introduce me to him, and I doubt he'll respond to my messages asking to have a beer with him now that he's busy with performing the role of the Vice President of the United States.  It would become very quickly obvious that my assumption was incorrect.

On the other hand, a proposition like "the contents of scientific theories describe reality as it truly is rather than reality as filtered through our perceptual mechanisms" isn't really susceptible to that sort of falsification because it's not a proposition we could falsify by living as if it's true for a year.  Similarly, a proposition like "there is a ground of being from which all that exists gained its existence and sustains its existence and we call this God" isn't susceptible to being falsified by living a year as if it were true.

So if people want to do "a year with ________"  or "a year without ________" experiments to discover a truth, it's important that they actually choose a truth that can be falsified (or at least made significantly more or less probable in light of a Bayesian analysis) by means of doing that experiment.  Ryan Bell didn't really consider experimental design effectively when deciding to live for a year without God, obviously.

2.  Cognitive biases always tilt us toward thinking we've confirmed what we assume.

When we live as if something is true for a significant period of time, it gives our confirmation bias lots of opportunities to work its magic. One of the byproducts of that is that we find all sorts of new reasons to believe whatever proposition it is.

And because of the familiarity principle, the more we expose ourselves to the phenomenon of living this way, the more we appreciate it and enjoy it, as long as there aren't direct and obvious negative consequences to doing so that we can't explain away by way of confirmation bias. Add into the mix that in this process, we will generally seek and find a community of people who believe it as well, and then normal emotional attachments, groupthink, and the in-group bias we all suffer from will tend to keep us on that path.

Atheists often (correctly) point out that tendency to rationalize whatever it is you already believe when looking at how many people share the religion of their parents.  Rationalizing what we already believe or how we already behave is a perfectly natural consequence of how our brains work.  And that remains true once we change those beliefs.  Our brain picks right up and rationalizes our new belief in the same way.

I've often noticed that new believers (whether a new skeptic or new Christian) don't have good reasons that they can articulate for their new belief.  Those good reasons and good arguments tend to accumulate over a number of years of thought and dialogue rather than actually being the primary driver of the change in belief.

Of course, another byproduct of living as if something were true is that we understand better the position of those who hold what we commit to living out as true. And that's quite valuable. I've found it to be valuable, at any rate.  That seems to me to be the better reason for living for a time as an atheist, or a Buddhist, or a Christian, or a Muslim, and so on.  It would be a valuable way to understand those with whom you disagree.  That said...

In the end, it's not reasonable to live a year without God as a means of deciding whether God exists or not because it's not the kind of proposition that can be tested that way.  And it's not reliable because of the outsized impact of our normal human tendency to rationalize whatever it is we are currently doing on our conclusions about what's true.

The Anthropomorphosis of Science

A number of atheists I've dialogued with or whose debates I've observed in the past have pointed out that it's not fair to give credit to God for the events we like and not blame God for the events we don't like.  Which is odd, because plenty of people do blame God for events that they don't like.  Most theists have probably been angry at God for precisely that reason at some point in life.

Some of the more philosophically sophisticated atheists chose to point out instead that it wasn't fair to give credit to God for what one's surgeon had done to save one's life.  Instead of giving credit to the proximate cause of our healing (a good surgeon with good tools), we superstitious theists would invoke the ultimate cause of the universe that we called God, anthropomorphizing distant forces that we didn't actually understand.

It is with this background that I've observed the rhetoric around the recent March for Science.  Undoubtedly, plenty of those who are part of the March for Science are theists.  Many theists are scientific realists right along with most atheists.  I certainly was.

But it is not just theists who engage in anthropomorphizing abstract causes which are not proximate to the outcome.  Exhibit A from the March for Science coverage is an article in Salon which is entitled, "Science saved my life" and contains a genuinely touching description of how science kept her from going down a dangerous path of addiction and an unfulfilling life.

It's not very different from the AA or NA testimonies I've read or heard in person.  But instead of finding God being the cause of her ability to relinquish her addiction, it was finding science.

Except, it wasn't science in an abstract sense that she found.  She had an encounter with methodical, practical learning, the pursuit of knowledge which gradually drew her out of her reliance on old addictions as coping mechanisms.  And she fell in love with this kind of learning, the grand unveiling of the mysteries of the universe insofar as we tiny-brained hominids can unveil them.

Like most people who found something more enticing than an addiction to alcohol, or marijuana, or prescription painkillers, or various other and more profoundly mind-altering substances, our erstwhile convert to scientific realism attributes her transformation to the system of ideas abstracted into one concept rather than just owning that she found something healthier than her old addictions to shape her life.

Just as my grandfather attributed his abandonment of his old addictions to his finding religion, the author attributes her abandonment of those same old addictions to finding science.  This is, of course, not a bad thing to find something healthier to replace our addictions.  Even if the replacement is just as addictive and we are overly attached to it, it may nonetheless be far less damaging than our old addictions.

This should indeed be celebrated rather than being mourned.  I'm genuinely glad that she found science and that it allowed her to be freed of those old addictions to transient pleasures.

At the same time, I can't ignore that this is part of a broader trend.  The popular conception of science, like the popular conception of God, has become reductively abstracted and oddly anthropomorphic.

Science is now treated more frequently as a causal explanation ("It's science!" a la Bill Nye and memes) rather than a body of methodologies that gradually allow us to uncover our numerous errors about the world and our experience of it.

Science is no longer that unpopular but necessary discipline for discovery and innovation that codifies the best of human learning heuristics into a broad field of study, it's become a popular invocation of epistemological authority.  We can see this in a variety of other popular memes.

As someone who is very pro-science, who wants to support science education, scientific research, and political decision-making more informed by science, this trend is a troubling one.  When religion becomes a tool used to make claims unthinkingly (and simultaneously authoritatively) such that it's difficult to question it, that's a serious problem for free inquiry.

And what I see today is science being used the same way religion has been by people who have a poor and popular understanding of it, so I worry that scientific inquiry may be compromised by a popular perception of it completely at odds with the free inquiry it ought to manifest and indeed fulfill.

This is why I'm generally opposed to the anthropomorphosis of science.

Related:  The Benefit of Doubt: The Question of Science

Note:  The above is a picture I took of part of one of my science fair trophies.

Orthodoxy: The Voyeur

This past year, I read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton after many years of my friends recommending it to me.  My reading list is rather lengthy, both in terms of the actual word count of the books and the number of books on my list to read at some point.  Fortunately, Orthodoxy is a fairly short book of only 154 pages in the edition I purchased, and the font size is not tiny as it would be if the publisher were trying to cram more words into fewer pages.

In the chapter entitled "The Suicide of Thought" which follows "The Maniac", Chesterton expands on his previous themes, one of which is the mind sharpened to a single, painful point.

"The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good.  It is full of wild and wasted virtues.  When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose.  The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage.  But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.  The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.  The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.  Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless.  Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."

Chesterton observes that virtues untethered from the ground of the divine life of love are prone to err recklessly.  Virtues, when adhered to closely without being balanced by other important virtues, become terrible and tyrannical.  They overwhelm the moral sense of an individual, allowing him to carry out horrible acts of extremism with the best of intentions.  The rationalist can easily reason his way to genocide when no other virtues than rationality get in his way.

The scientist can easily experiment indifferently on the poor and vulnerable when the automobile of the pursuit of knowledge has no moral brakes on it, when finding the truth is the only virtue and no room is left for the movement of the heart to shift him away from hurting those who need the most healing.

"For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity.  He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive.  Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions.  For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy.  He really is the enemy of the human race--because he is so human.  As the other extreme, we may take the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart.  Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth.  Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth.  But in Torquemada's time there was at least a system that could to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other.  Now they do not even bow."

Even the virtue of charity, the virtue divine, the virtue par excellence, becomes a terrible shadow of itself when detached from other virtues which keep it in balance.  Mercy, rather than being the virtue of pardoning the sinner, when out of balance becomes the vice of failing to recognize when we have sinned.  Charity, rather than being the virtue that allows one to love one's neighbor as oneself, when out of balance becomes the vice of making excuses for one's neighbor as one makes excuses for one's self.

Chesterton's next example is about what happens when a virtue gets misplaced, not in the sense of being lost from us, but rather when we use an important virtue outside of the context in which it is truly valuable.

"But a much stronger case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation of humility.

It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned.  Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man.  He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs.  His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys.  By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.  Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.  Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility.  Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility.  Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility.  For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we.  All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble.  It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything--even pride."

Chesterton rightly explains that humility is a virtue that helps keep our egos in check so that we can mitigate our destructive self-assurance.  Also, that humility is a necessary ingredient for wonder and the building of things which are wondrous precisely because we are humbled by them.

"But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason.  

Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature.  But the new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.  Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.  The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.  The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder.  But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

Chesterton mentions Nietzsche a fair amount later in this chapter, and this is fitting given that Nietzsche's critique of a worthless skepticism has some important things in common with Chesterton's critique of the same.

"We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.  We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.  Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.  The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance."

Both Chesterton and Nietzsche see that the modern skeptic so easily falls into an unwillingness to risk, to commit, to let his "Yes!" mean "Yes!"  and "No!" mean "No!"  The modern skeptic timidly slouches his way beyond sensible epistemological humility and refrains politely from having strong opinions on important matters (at least ostensibly).  His mind remains so open that he never manages to get anything worth having into it for any length of time, so open that it may as well be closed.

 After all, the open-minded skeptic who never settles on any truths is no better off intellectually than the close-minded bigot who never allows his mind to be infiltrated by truths previously unknown to him.  Both are effectively cut off from any growth of the mind because they refuse to let anything be planted there long enough to sprout.

"To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania.  The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.  This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought.  What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought.  It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course.  It has run its course.  It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.  We have seen it end.

It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.  You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.  It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretense that modern England is Christian.  But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow.  Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one.  

Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.  It is weary of its own success.  If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set."

Both Nietzsche and Chesterton agree that this dead and worthless skepticism is not life-giving, and indeed may be well be deadly for the mind, the soul, and even the body.  It is, in short, suicidal for free thought to take as its axiom (or its conclusion) that thought has no telos, no chance of reaching a truth upon which our minds might settle.

Where Chesterton parts ways with Nietzsche is on the pre-eminent importance of the will, and he critiques Nietzsche on that point:

"All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition.  They cannot will, they can hardly wish.  And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily.  It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out.  But it is quite the opposite.  Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.  To desire action is to desire limitation.  In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.  When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act.  Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion.  Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses.  If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton.  If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon.  It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense.  For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries of "I will.""

But he agrees with Nietzsche on the importance of a robust intellectual life.  Clearly, Chesterton was an intellectual and valued the rational work of the mind, and yet he recognizes that while it may be necessary for many people, it is not sufficient to live the life of greatness.

He draws on the life of a well-known and controversial Saint to use in an illustrative comparison:

"Joan of Arc was not stuck at the crossroads, either by rejecting all paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche.  She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.  Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.  I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back.  Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time.  I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.  Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought.  We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.  Tolstoy only praised that peasant; she was the peasant.  Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior.

She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other.  Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing."

Joan of Arc was many things, but she was no mere voyeur, no wild speculator who is constantly exhorting others to take the great actions she was not willing to take.  She acted decisively and changed the world.  She risked big, won big, and lost big too.

The sexual voyeur is the man who gazes hungrily, longing to satisfy his hunger while focused on the object of his desires.  But he isn't willing to take the risk of the pursuit, the risk of committing to that which he desires, perhaps because it might make demands on him.  After all, to commit to actualizing his desires requires giving up many others.

Most of us know to avoid being entangled with a voyeur, because a fulfilling relationship with the voyeur is not an option with one who only wants to watch.  But we may not know to avoid his cousin, the intellectual voyeur.

Chesterton warns us against the intellectual voyeur, the constant skeptic, the man who is willing to look hungrily at all sorts of beliefs, longing to satisfy his hunger for truth, but who is unwilling to risk committing himself to live those beliefs with boldness, and perhaps because it would make too many demands on him.  He would indeed have to give up many other beliefs to do so, and this is an onerous burden to one who is comfortable just examining them at a distance.

Just as we avoid being entangled with the voyeur, we ought to keep ourselves from becoming the voyeur.  May we all follow the path of greatness, boldly committing ourselves to believe hard and work hard for those beliefs, never to become comfortable with just watching.

I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. -- G.K. Chesterton

Note: The above is an image I captured of the cover of my copy of the book being reviewed here.

Fair Questions: What evidence is sufficient to believe in a supernatural cause?

Previously, I addressed the question asked by Michael Shermer: What would it take to prove the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth?

I did not think it was actually a very useful question, and so I would like to ask a better question that actually gets at the root of the issue: What evidence is sufficient to believe in a supernatural cause?

There's no particular reason that Shermer and other materialists and/or physicalists can't just assume that there's a natural, material explanation for someone rising from the dead and wandering around.  After all, that's what they assume about many scientifically unexplained events.

So it's not necessary for so many of them to reflexively deny that someone rose from the dead.  What is necessary for the materialist who believes that all things have a natural cause to deny is any claim that some phenomenon (or all phenomena) has a supernatural cause.

And this is, I think, precisely why they object to religions which claim that there are supernatural causes, whether for specific events, or as a first cause of all things.  It would also explain why, when I have asked them specifically what sort of evidence they would accept for claims about the existence of a deity, the responses have been...interesting.

One example from a dialogue I had many years ago with a very bright agnostic atheist.  I asked him what sort of evidence would be sufficient for believing in extraordinary claims.  He proposed video evidence (presumably with audio as well).

So, with some new additional details to make the story a bit more fully-fleshed, I described something very similar to the following scenario as a hypothetical example of an extraordinary claim with video evidence of it:

A woman's mother was dying from a very aggressive cancer, and all the doctors in the United States whom she had been diagnosed by said that there was nothing to be done except make her as comfortable as possible for the last few months of her life.

She found a clinic in Mumbai that was willing to try a new treatment on her mother, and so she and her mother booked a flight to India and got a ride to the clinic in Mumbai.  Because the patients were part of a study which was testing the efficacy of the new treatment, there were video cameras in the rooms.

After they had spoken with the nurses and doctor who was primarily responsible, her mother was placed in one of the rooms, where she would be prepared for treatment.  The day before the treatment was to begin, while the woman was there with her mother in the room, there was a flash of light which temporarily overwhelmed the video camera.

After the light faded, the video recorded a blue-skinned, four-armed figure dressed very strangely who had suddenly appeared in the room.  The figure identifies himself as Vishnu, tells the woman's mother that she is healed, refers to himself as the divine preserver and sustainer of the cosmos, and leaves with her a gold trinket in the shape of a lotus blossom.

There is another flash of light, and then the blue-skinned, four-armed figure is gone again.  The doctor is concerned when the woman tells him of these events that were captured on video, and he has the video checked.  He also has her re-checked for the cancer, and can't find any cancer remaining.

When the woman and her mother return to the United States, none of the doctors they've seen before can find any cancer either.  The woman dies peacefully many years later in her sleep.

So, I asked, in this hypothetical scenario, is the video of these events sufficient evidence to believe that a deity named Vishnu healed the woman of her cancer?

The answer I was given was a resounding, "No."  I was advised that the more plausible explanation is that an extraterrestrial intelligent and super-humanly competent life form had healed her.  Personally, I would accept such evidence as described in the above scenario as evidence of the existence of Vishnu, in the same way that I would accept similar kinds of evidence for other phenomena.

But given the assumptions of a person who believes that all things have natural causes, this is a perfectly understandable response.  It's quite coherent with that worldview.  And it shows us something important about the consequence of that belief: there is no room for any supernatural cause as an explanation for anything if one holds to materialist metaphysics.

For someone who believes that everything has a material/natural cause, there is no possible evidence that is sufficient to believe in a supernatural cause.  They are simply not open, at least intellectually, to belief in supernatural beings or supernatural phenomena.

Even if such a person witnesses, at the end of the age, a bearded Jewish carpenter named Jesus of Nazareth coming with the clouds from Heaven and surrounded by angels with flaming swords, they would have to conclude only that they were suffering from a vivid hallucination, or perhaps that these were just extra-terrestrial life-forms whose origin is purely a natural process of evolution on other planets.

On the other hand, for those of us who have a common-sense standard of evidence, we actually have the ability to be open to evidence of both natural and supernatural causes of phenomena.  And I think that open-mindedness is valuable so long as we have critical thinking processes to help us mitigate our quite powerful and perfectly normal human confirmation bias.

Note: The above is a picture I took of an icon I purchased from legacyicons.com which is depicting Michael the Archangel in Heaven.

Fair Questions: What could prove that Jesus rose from the dead?

In the April 2017 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer asks a pointed question just before the celebration of Easter.  What would it take to prove the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this question is just a distraction.  Why?  I'm so glad you asked for a lengthy explanation.

Let's start by thinking about other medically unexplainable phenomena.  There have been plenty of medically anomalous healings in human history.  Sometimes there was a plausible natural explanation.  Sometimes there was no plausible natural explanation.

In cases of healings and recoveries without a plausible natural explanation, people choose to believe one of two general options based on the assumptions that under-gird their worldviews.

1. There was a natural cause and we just don't know what it was.
2. There was a supernatural cause of some kind (generally one that fits their existing beliefs about the supernatural).

These are also two options taken with regard to belief in the death by crucifixion and subsequent resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  There are others, of course.  Some propose that Jesus didn't really exist at all.  Or they propose that the Gospel account of his death and resurrection were all lies.

To be fair, that's much easier than being honest and just observing that documentation of eyewitness accounts by people who were risking death by publicly professing Christianity and rejecting the imperial religion of Rome is indeed evidence for his life, death, and resurrection.

Some skeptics seem to think that accepting the Gospels as evidence is proof of the resurrection (and thus they want to claim that the Gospels don't count as evidence at all). But I don't think that's actually the case, which we can see if we carefully consider how evidence works to support a belief.

Let's take as an example the claim that the Earth is round as opposed to a flat plane.  I've seen ships suddenly appear on the horizon, which gives me an intuitive sense that the Earth is not a perfectly flat plane.  I have read written accounts of astronauts journeying to space and looking at the Earth, and I've seen pictures of the Earth looking awfully round from the perspective of one who is orbiting it or moving far away from it.  I've read physicists' accounts of the observational evidence.  Et cetera.

Of course, it's possible that the photos are doctored to give a false impression, that the written accounts are government propaganda, and that my intuition about the ships is wrong and their sudden appearance on the horizon is simply due to my poor eyesight.

I could be wrong about the earth being round, and I'm not sure I would say that it has been proven to be round given that the evidence I have is not the direct evidence of the experience of seeing it for myself.  Nonetheless, the preponderance of evidence I have available to me strongly suggests that the earth is round, and I believe that it is.

We can see from this example that evidence, even what we might think of as strong evidence, is not the same thing as a deductive proof (from geometry, for example).  A correctly-written proof cannot possibly be wrong, given the axioms of geometry.  This is not the case with the wider world.  It can be described in geometric terms, but this would be a paltry description of only a small portion of phenomena.

It would be wrong by being overly simplistic, not because geometry isn't quite valuable.  All this is to say that while we can't straightforwardly prove things in the wider world in the same way that we can in the confines of geometry or other formal logico-mathematical systems, it makes little sense to say that the kinds of things we generally count as evidence are suddenly not evidence at all when we find the claim implausible based on our experience and philosophical assumptions.

That makes about as much sense as many religious folks suddenly lowering the standard of evidence for belief when something strikes them as plausible given their philosophical assumptions and life experience.  After all, the benefit of having a consistent standard of evidence is that it allows us to check our beliefs even when our life experience and philosophical assumptions lead us astray.

But having a consistent standard of evidence cannot serve us well in that regard if we conveniently modify our standard of evidence when it suits our desire to maintain our existing worldviews.  I'm not aware of any public intellectual who applies the same epistemic standards to events they deem extraordinary that they apply to events that seem ordinary to them.

But that's not a crazy thing to do.  It's probably the only way we can defeat our confirmation bias.  At the very least, altering our standard of evidence immediately upon encountering something that seems implausible is just giving confirmation bias an opportunity to work its magic, and it's a terrible way to do science as well.

So when I read of the principle of proportionality which Shermer invokes with regard to the ethics of belief, though I recognize that it's intuitively appealing as an axiom, I suspect that it just helps us confirm whatever we already believe by ignoring evidence we would rather not acknowledge.

Such is the nature of confirmation bias, a bias which Shermer has studied at some length among other cognitive biases.  Perhaps for this reason, he might be sympathetic to my concerns about suddenly changing our standards of evidence with regard to claims we believe are highly implausible.

So if we can't really prove the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in the way that we prove other things,  rather than cooking up another standard of evidence that will be more difficult to meet, I think that we should use the standard of evidence that we use for evaluating other claims.

Depending on what precisely that standard of evidence is, we may end up believing that Jesus rose from the dead or we may not believe it.  But at least we would be intellectually consistent because we used the same standard.

All this is to say that there's no particular reason for anti-religion folks to try to claim that the Gospels don't count as evidence (because counting it as evidence doesn't mean one needs to be a Christian), and there's no reason to think that one could prove the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth inductively by way of textual evidence.  Or anything else, for that matter.

The real question at issue here is not one of proving that a specific event took place.  After all, we can just assume that the Gospel accounts are correct that Jesus was walking around after having been seen dying and dead by many eyewitnesses, and still account for that event by stating that it must have had natural causes (i.e. concocted illusions, eyewitnesses being drugged, et cetera).

The real question at issue here is the question of what sort of evidence could possibly be sufficient to justify belief in a supernatural cause.

Related: What evidence is sufficient to believe in a supernatural cause?

Note:  The above is a picture I took of an icon of the Resurrection I purchased from orthodoxmonasteryicons.com a while ago.

Surveying the Moral Landscape Again

Back in 2013, I responded to a TED Talk given by Sam Harris about how science can determine human values by pointing out that even if he's correct, this has consequences with which he should not be pleased.

Though my argument about the consequences of his view may have been highly unusual, I was far from the only philosopher to take issue with Harris' claim that science can determine human values.  And he graciously responded by offering a challenge to other philosophers seeking to refute his position.

Ryan Born's surprisingly brief essay was the winner of that challenge (in the sense that his response was judged to be the best), though he definitely did not persuade Harris to recant his position that science can determine morality.  Nonetheless, his essay from 2014 is well worth reading.

It provides an excellent summary of the basic argument against Harris' claim that he has found a way to determine human values using scientific means.  Harris, of course, responded to the essay with one of his own to defend his position.  And, having read it, I found it very helpful.

At the very least, it makes his position more understandable, whether one agrees with it or not.  His rebuttal offered to Ryan Born's points is fairly effective, and I recommend that everyone with an interest in the topic read it at his blog under the title "Clarifying the Moral Landscape" for that reason.

Harris' response isn't intended to address my previous critique, and I don't want to re-hash that argument here even though my argument could certainly use some refinement.  Nonetheless, I do want to address some of his responses to Born's essay.  Harris writes:

I also disagree with the distinction Ryan draws between “descriptive” and “prescriptive” enterprises. Ethics is prescriptive only because we tend to talk about it that way—and I believe this emphasis comes, in large part, from the stultifying influence of Abrahamic religion. We could just as well think about ethics descriptively. Certain experiences, relationships, social institutions, and technological developments are possible—and there are more or less direct ways to arrive at them. Again, we have a navigation problem. To say we “should” follow some of these paths and avoid others is just a way of saying that some lead to happiness and others to misery. “You shouldn’t lie” (prescriptive) is synonymous with “Lying needlessly complicates people’s lives, destroys reputations, and undermines trust” (descriptive). “We should defend democracy from totalitarianism” (prescriptive) is another way of saying “Democracy is far more conducive to human flourishing than the alternatives are” (descriptive). In my view, moralizing notions like “should” and “ought” are just ways of indicating that certain experiences and states of being are better than others.

Many readers seem confused by the fact that my account of ethics isn’t overtly prescriptive.

I don't find myself confused at all that Harris' account of ethics is first and foremost a descriptive account of how we experience various states.  It makes perfect sense if one's goal is to understand morality as a science in the general sense in which he uses the term "science".  Science is a descriptive endeavor, though its descriptions help clarify our sense of what the world is like and how to navigate it.

And in the same way, Harris thinks that the descriptions of science help us clarify our sense of the moral options available to us so that we can navigate them.  It's completely coherent with his general worldview, which tries to reduce everything to and ground everything in the descriptive methodology of science defined more generally.

The spuriousness of our traditional categories in moral philosophy can be seen in how we teach our children to be good. Why do we want them to be good in the first place? Well, at a minimum, we’d rather they not wind up bludgeoned in a ditch. More generally, we want them to flourish—to live happy, creative, meaningful lives—and to help make the world a better place. All this entails talking about rules and heuristics (deontology), a person’s character (virtue ethics), and the good and bad consequences of certain actions (consequentialism). But it all reduces to a concern for the well-being of our children and (generally to a lesser extent) of the people with whom they will interact. I don’t believe that any sane person is concerned with abstract principles and virtues—such as justice and loyalty—independent of the ways they affect our lives.

Harris is right, I think, that traditional categories in moral philosophy suggest clear distinctions that might not exist with such stark separation as they are often presented, though I do think they have more merit than he does (you can see why below).

I'm less sure that he's right that all these factors (moral duties and heuristics, personal character, consequences for ourselves and others) reduce to a concern for well-being.  Mature ethical reasoning on our part does seem to at least take into account well-being in some way, but I'm not sure why the consistent inclusion of well-being suggests that we can reduce those other factors to well-being.

What's the evidence for the claim that they all reduce to a concern about consequences?  The general attitude of parents cited by Harris doesn't persuade me on this point any more than Ryan Born's points persuaded him.

Ryan also seems to take for granted that the traditional categories of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are conceptually valid and worth maintaining. However, I believe that partitioning moral philosophy in this way begs the very question at issue—and this is one reason I tend not to identify myself as a “consequentialist.” Everyone knows—or thinks he knows—that consequentialism fails to capture much of what we value. This is true almost by definition, because, as Ryan observes, “serious competing theories of value and morality exist.”

But if the categorical imperative (one of Kant’s foundational contributions to deontology, or rule-based ethics) reliably made everyone miserable, no one would defend it as an ethical principle. Similarly, if virtues such as generosity, wisdom, and honesty caused nothing but pain and chaos, no sane person could consider them good. In my view, deontologists and virtue ethicists smuggle the good consequences of their ethics into the conversation from the start.

Harris is correct that both deontologists and virtue ethicists take consequences into account, though I'm not sure that it's fair to say that either group of ethicists are smuggling them in.  The difference between a consequentialist and deontologist is one of the order in which their principles are invoked.

For a consequentialist, the first principle in ethical reasoning is the consideration of consequences, and the consideration of intentionality because intentions often lead to consequences, and the consideration of virtues is performed because our character produces consequences for ourselves and others.

For a deontologist, the order is different.  The first principle in ethical reasoning is the intentional carrying out of our moral duty (the Kantian categorical imperative, for example), though we may need to cultivate various virtues in order to carry out our moral duty reliably, and the foundational moral duty may be defined in the way that it is (at least in part) because it reduces the harmful consequences of our behavior when it is carried out.

I used this example because I wanted to avoid presenting my own position (which is in the virtue ethics tradition) in a self-serving way, but we could understand virtue ethics similarly as positing that the first principle of ethical reasoning is to define and cultivate virtues, virtues being understood as habits of character which lead us to behave intentionally in ways that consistently reduce harmful consequences for others and for ourselves.

That is not my own theory of virtue ethics, but it has some important parallels with the other examples, and so I've used it here.  Regardless, what differentiates the various theories of ethics from one another is the order in which the various factors in ethical reasoning are invoked.

Of course, the differing orders of application of these factors can have serious consequences for our navigation of the moral landscape, and thus for our well-being, and perhaps Harris might see them as worthwhile distinctions to make for that reason.

Surveying the Moral Landscape - Surveying the Moral Landscape Again

Note: The above is a picture I took while running alongside a river.

The Slow Death of God

I recently enjoyed this video from the Atheists United channel on YouTube.  They have many useful videos, and I encourage all who are interested in atheism to subscribe to it.




Ryan Bell, formerly a pastor in the Seventh Day Adventist denomination, became quite the famous Internet sensation when he chose to live for a year as an atheist to see what it would be like.  In this video, he explains why he was fired from his position as pastor, and how it impacted his family.

But, more interesting to me, he explains some of the nagging questions he had faced during his journey to try to find the truth.  One was particularly interesting to me as a philosopher.  He asks, quite understandably, why anyone would worship the God that could be rationally argued for in a church every Sunday.

After all, the God that can be argued for in purely rational terms is quite abstract, quite mysterious, even incomprehensible.  This sort of divine principle, a sort of creative and yet impersonal ground of existence, the first cause, isn't the sort of God one can cultivate a relationship with, is it?

How or why would we bother to relate to such a being?  How would we bridge what seems like an immense chasm between us and such a God?  I'll happily admit that we can't bridge the gap ourselves.  Only God could do so.  Hence the Incarnation.

And hence the Crucifixion, the crux of the Incarnation.  The Holy Cross of Christ is the bridge that allows us to cross the chasm between our humanity and the divinity of God.  Christianity has the answer to Bell's very good question.  To be fair, Hinduism does have an answer as well, via the avatars of Vishnu.

Or Judaism via the Ark of the Covenant and their liberation from Egypt.  Regardless, there is an answer to Bell's question here.  It's not as if there was no answer to his question.  He just didn't think it was an adequate one.  Fair enough.  We all get to decide whether or not we accept certain kinds of philosophical claims.  C'est la vie.

What I found wearying about Bell's story was not that he became an atheist, but rather that he did such a poor job of exploring Christian theology before he did so.  The slow death of God in his intellectual life wasn't a matter of rejecting traditional Christian theology.  It was a matter of rejecting, quite understandably, the bad theological work done by those who had, like him, rejected traditional Christian theology without understanding it.

This certainly doesn't make him stupid.  He seems quite intelligent and conscientious on the whole.  But it does suggest that a sound understanding of Christian theology developed in the last few hundred years is inadequate to helping people of an intellectual bent retain their Christian spiritual life.

Sound ancient Christian theology isn't just an optional luxury for a few academics that has no practical benefit for the average person.  The benefit is clear: it's one of the few things that can provide a bulwark against (at least in the minds of modern thinkers) the slow death of God.

Related: The Death of "Death of God" Theology

A Reductive Philosophy of Religion

I've gotten in a habit of writing about writing lately.  That may be simply be a product of having done so much of it over the past several years and having the opportunity to reflect.  Specifically, I like to reassess the processes I use in my writing.

One reason for this is that I want to identify areas in which I can improve my writing, and the other is that I want to identify areas in which I can improve my thinking.  Though what I primarily spend time on is self-assessment to identify my own mistakes and correct them, I have also noticed some mistakes made by other writers.

A common one that I try to avoid when writing about religion in the form of a philosophical exposition is the creation of what I call a reductive philosophy of religion.  I've noticed that many intelligent bloggers, and journalists, and occasionally even professional philosophers have a tendency to manufacture a reductive philosophy of [insert religion here].

Nietzsche, for example, despite his very real brilliance, had a somewhat reductive understanding of Buddhism and Christianity.  While he presented his case robustly, and I really enjoy his works in general, Nietzsche had significant gaps in his knowledge of both religions, as well as his knowledge of Judaism.  I tend to think that he presented a reductive philosophy of religion to some extent, though perhaps to not as great an extent as some others among the Four (German) Horsemen of Atheism.

Certainly not all the folks writing about religion do this.  But there are many, especially in journalism and blogging, who do frequently manage it.  This is probably not their intention (though a few do seem to be malicious).  I tend to think that most people covering the topic of religion through philosophical exposition are seeking to be respectful of the religion, but are following common intellectual practices that lead in the other direction.

What I mean by this is that they seem to use a couple of approaches that tend to produce a reductive philosophy of a particular religion or of religion in general.

1. The first approach is the one which assumes that we can understand a religion well enough from its text(s) alone, or from a translation of those texts, and then critique the religion from our reading of the text(s).
2. The second approach is the one which assumes that we can understand a religion as a set of philosophical propositions, isolated from its larger context and the experience of its practitioners, and then critique those propositions as if they were the religion.

The problem with these approaches is not that reading the texts is a bad idea or that understanding the philosophical propositions embedded in the religion is a bad idea.  Both, I think, are quite necessary for performing any kind of philosophical exposition of a religion.

The problem, then, is that these approaches, even when combined, are insufficient for understanding a religion.  Reading the texts is a great start, and considering precisely what sorts of philosophical propositions are found within the religion's teachings is also a good start.

So what else do we need to understand a religion properly?  Reading the commentaries on the texts from highly educated and strongly devout practitioners of the religion is a good addition.  Reading translator's notes is important.  Reading about the historical context of the events being recounted in the text is necessary to understanding also.

Reading the testimonies of people who converted to the religion can be useful as well.  Reading the profound experiences people had while practicing their religion can be quite eye-opening.  But all this reading, extremely good as it is, isn't quite enough to really understand a religion.

Speaking to a normal everyday person who tries sincerely to live their religion's teachings is valuable in that regard.  Attending the services of that religious group is just as necessary as reading the texts.  And for those who really want to understand another religion, taking up its practices for a time adds a whole new dimension to understanding the religion.

More importantly, our experience of the religion can help us to view it and the people who practice it more holistically, more charitably, and more accurately.  We can then convey the truths proclaimed by the religion more robustly and more fluently.

We can then see what is good, what is mediocre, and what is bad in the religion with more clarity.  Not only that, but we can then articulate the beauty found in the religion, even the beauty in its flaws, with greater eloquence and genuine appreciation.

It is this genuine appreciation for what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful in each religious tradition that keeps us out of the most egregious pitfalls that lead to producing a reductive philosophy of religion.

Related: How can we dialogue with other religions respectfully?

Note: The above image is part of the cover of my copy of Nietzsche's collected works.

Fair Questions: What is the relationship between faith and reason?

In my last post on the relationship between faith and evidence, I examined what sorts of standards of evidence we might have and what their implications are.  Because there are today some who put forward the idea that faith and reason are opposed to one another, or that having faith in anything is mutually exclusive with being a reasonable person, this seems to be a timely topic.

I've taken enough philosophy courses to learn that, in practice, faith in unproven propositions that we nonetheless intuitively feel are correct propositions is universal.  I've never dialogued with any religious or irreligious person who didn't have to resort to just asserting something without proof.  Maybe that happened at the level of ontology, or epistemology, or meta-philosophical critique, but it always happened.

These sorts of foundational assumptions can of course be overturned, albeit usually with great difficulty.  I and many other people have overturned our previous foundational assumptions, rebuilding our understanding of the world, hopefully upon a more solid basis.  Or at the very least, we may have arrived at a more internally coherent worldview, reasoning more correctly from our premises to our conclusions.

This seems to be the kind of thing we see in the most sophisticated intellectual debates, such as the one between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston.  They both demonstrate extremely high intellectual acuity and consistency and willing to examine other views honestly.  They simply have two very different ways of understanding the world and what we can conclude about it.

Both are internally coherent and well-reasoned, and both rest on certain claims that cannot be proven.  In this case, they seem to differ at the level of epistemology, providing different rational answers to the question of what we can know and how we can know it.  The value of these sorts of debates isn't to find the right answers to our questions about our world.

It's that we begin to understand in a more precise and accurate way how exactly it is we disagree, and which foundational assumptions are at the root of the disagreement.  These foundational assumptions, or acts of faith, are necessary for any kind of rational dialogue to take place.

Without, for example, the assumption that we can use reason and sensory evidence to arrive at (at least potentially correct or less incorrect) conclusions about our world, there could be no rational debate of any kind.

In the end, reason without faith is impotent, and faith without reason is incoherent.

Faith and Confirmation Bias - Faith and Evidence - Faith and Reason