"The God Delusion" discussion thread

Great Debates
101

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Why not? Certainly science won’t help us in understanding the artistic merit of the symphony. But it can help us understand which areas in the brain correspond to that emotional state. What corresponds to a spiritual uplift, if indeed there is a connection. We could then try influencing those regions directly, to see if we can cause that same emotional state or spiritual uplift without the music. Sounds like science to me.

IOW, that which may be sensed may not be under the purview of science always; but the sensing is.
[/QUOTE]

At the beginning of the thread, I said that humans have different modes of experiencing reality, and that the artistic mode is one. Knowing that certain parts of the brain are active while listening to Beethoven’s Ninth would not, to me diminish the artistic value of the symphony or diminish the value of the artistic mode of experience as a whole. I couldn’t care less which neurons are firing when I hear a symphony, or see a painting, or read a novel. It would be safe to say that very few people do. When I experience a great work of art, I know that I am experiencing a contact with the transcendent within the artistic essence. Science cannot say anything about that contact with the transcendent since the contact only involved my consciousness, and nothing within the physical world. (Of course I’m aware that some people are convinced that consciousness can be reduced until it is understood purely in physical terms, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.)

102

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
Of course, some things clearly aren’t comprehensible to us yet, just like quantum physics wasn’t comprehensible before 1900. But like I said, quantum physics wasn’t just made up without evidence. At no time in history have the beliefs of people without evidence EVER been a reliable predictor of what it was then unknown. Never. Not once. But theists still keep hoping they’ll be right about this. Why?
[/QUOTE]

It appears that when considering whose predictions are fulfilled you consider only the physical. Some of us believe that religion has performed pretty well in addressing questions such as, “What will make people happy?” (Or at least that religion has performed well as compared to its rivals.) And if these are the questions that matter to us, then we’re not likely to bow down to the supposedly amazing predictive powers of science.

(That and there are many instances where scientific theories remain popular even though they don’t have predictive power. But that would be another thread for another time.)

103

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
At the beginning of the thread, I said that humans have different modes of experiencing reality, and that the artistic mode is one. Knowing that certain parts of the brain are active while listening to Beethoven’s Ninth would not, to me diminish the artistic value of the symphony or diminish the value of the artistic mode of experience as a whole. I couldn’t care less which neurons are firing when I hear a symphony, or see a painting, or read a novel. It would be safe to say that very few people do. When I experience a great work of art, I know that I am experiencing a contact with the transcendent within the artistic essence. Science cannot say anything about that contact with the transcendent since the contact only involved my consciousness, and nothing within the physical world. (Of course I’m aware that some people are convinced that consciousness can be reduced until it is understood purely in physical terms, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.)
[/QUOTE]
Certainly consciousness hasn’t been reduced entirely to physical explanations. But it has to a great extent. You seem to be saying that because it hasn’t totally we can thus throw the matter away; at the very least, surely you would agree that your consciousness interacts with your brain on some level, even if you don’t think the two are one and the same? That can be measured, can’t it? You’re also forgetting that the art itself exists in the physical world - again, unless you’re suggesting that the trancendent within the artistic essence has zero connection to the physical nature of the art, then there’s certainly good reason to think we can, at least, hypothesize and test to try and see what exactly of the physical nature of the art tends to cause such an experience.

I think I would say i’m pretty interested in what neurons fire and where when I hear a symphony, both on the general level of “hooray for new information which is applicable to me” and also in order to try and see to what extent consciousness = the brain. And hey, if we can understand what it is about a particular piece of art that can cause such an experience, we might be able to replicate it.

104

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
It appears that when considering whose predictions are fulfilled you consider only the physical. Some of us believe that religion has performed pretty well in addressing questions such as, “What will make people happy?” (Or at least that religion has performed well as compared to its rivals.) And if these are the questions that matter to us, then we’re not likely to bow down to the supposedly amazing predictive powers of science.

(That and there are many instances where scientific theories remain popular even though they don’t have predictive power. But that would be another thread for another time.)
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think any atheist has ever denied that religion serves a social or psychological function. That’s what it’s for. That’s why it persists despite a complete absence of evidence for a God.

105

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
It appears that when considering whose predictions are fulfilled you consider only the physical. Some of us believe that religion has performed pretty well in addressing questions such as, “What will make people happy?” (Or at least that religion has performed well as compared to its rivals.) And if these are the questions that matter to us, then we’re not likely to bow down to the supposedly amazing predictive powers of science.

(That and there are many instances where scientific theories remain popular even though they don’t have predictive power. But that would be another thread for another time.)
[/QUOTE]

By and large, I think theistic religion has been much more interested in what will make God happy and what humans ought to do than in what makes people happy. Judaism certainly makes some claims about happiness, but it also calls those claims into question (e.g., Job). Christianity generally predicts persecution and suffering for its followers in this life.

I certainly think “What makes people happy?” is a perfectly fine scientific question, as is “What gives people a sense of spiritual fulfillment?” and “Do profound spiritual experiences lead to life changes and why or why not?” I’m not aware of any evidence that suggests either that any religious doctrines are true, or that one religion has better results (in this life) than another religion, or that religion overall does better than similar non-religious practices, but I’m definitely open to such evidence.

106

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
If your (or Dawkins’s) point is that the Bible is not the definitive source for morality, that it neither describes nor prescribes everything we need to know about right and wrong, I agree with that point. But that’s different from whether or not the Bible teaches or influences morality, and I think Dawkins makes a major mistake about how it purports to do so (as do others among its professed fans and foes).
[/QUOTE]

I think we can agree on this point, afterall, and I believe Dawkins would as well. The point is indeed that the Bible cannot, unlike some people’s claims, function as a source for morality. Now, as to the question on whether it teaches or influences morality, I think that depends on what you consider teaching. I do not believe, and I’m with Dawkins here, that the Bible as such is capable even of teaching morality, because the spread it offers on behaviour to emulate – from the Old Testament to the New – is just too large. There are moral and behavioral teachings for just about every taste in there. If there is someone who is teaching you morals, it is those people (priests, pastors, bishops, rabbis) who interpret the Bible for you and give you the guidelines by which to chose from the various injunctions therein. But these guidelines, again, are not in the Bible – they come from elsewhere.

To keep this close to Dawkins’s book (keeping with the spirit of the thread as well), the example he chose of Jesus’s telling his disciples that unless they “hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,” (p. 284 of my paperback) is very obviously an injunction that could be interpreted as a commandment for Christians to follow, but isn’t (unless I’m not up to speed on recent developments). But there is no exegetical reason, I believe, why that should be the case.

Now, does the Bible influence morality? It probably does. I’m not sure if that really means anything, however, since Dawkins was discussing the origins of morals, and since influencing morals can be a good thing as well as a bad thing, and the argument, in general, is that we need religion to know what’s good behaviour.

I’d be delighted to know (point me to a post if you’ve done so already, please) how you think Dawkins is wrong in the way he describes the Bible’s influence on morals.

107

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
It appears that when considering whose predictions are fulfilled you consider only the physical. Some of us believe that religion has performed pretty well in addressing questions such as, “What will make people happy?” (Or at least that religion has performed well as compared to its rivals.) And if these are the questions that matter to us, then we’re not likely to bow down to the supposedly amazing predictive powers of science.

(That and there are many instances where scientific theories remain popular even though they don’t have predictive power. But that would be another thread for another time.)
[/QUOTE]

You assume that there is anything beyond the physical – which is probably only fair since you’re also assuming the existence of good, neither suppositions are particularly well provable. Happiness is a perfectly identifiable physical phenomenon (endorphins playing a role in it; in fact, I’d consider it a particularly easy predicition to make scientifically, that I will have more success in making people happy by injecting them with endorphin-release inducing substances than by subjecting them to religious thought), and I’d love you to provide a cite on the assumption that religion has a particular good track record for providing happiness compared to which rivals, exactly?

As has already been said, it’s probably wrong to suggest that there is anything in our reaction to a symphony, or novel, a painting, or for that matter sex, love, or friendship, that must necessarily be outside the physical domain – especially when there’s no way to say that there even is anything outside the physical. You may correct me if I parse your suggestions wrongly, but you seem to be saying, essentially: there are sensations that are physical (the acoustic reception of the notes of the symphony) and some that are not (the emotional meaning of the symphony). Both of these happen somewhere within you (would you agree that they happen in your brain?), but the one you consider to fall under scientific purview, and the other you don’t, because although they both have the same location, your emotions were “beamed” in there from outside the physical?

Could you elaborate a little on the “artistic realm” and how there is anything in there that demonstrably does not fall under the purview of science (always keeping in mind that there have been excellent studies showing that many, many emotions, from fear to happiness, can be induced chemically or through direct stimulation [cites available on request])?

108

Rather than systematically critique the last few chapters, I’ll just throw out some comments, criticisms, and reactions to some of the things Dawkins says in them, with the caveat that I’ll be out of town (and probably away from the internet) much of this coming week, so if I don’t respond promptly, that’s why.

[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
Such absolutism nearly always results from strong religious faith, and it constitutes a major reason for suggesting that religion can be a force for evil in the world.
[/QUOTE]
I’m wondering if he’s making a “correlation implies causation” error here.

[QUOTE=Dawkins]
I thought [Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor] was an honest and sincere man, quietly spoken and thoughtful, but his mind had unfortunately been captured by powerful religious nonsense.
[/QUOTE]
The nonsense that captures minds need not be religious: Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) provides an excellent example of this.

This quote comes from a section in which Dawkins, if I understand correctly, says that secular moralists focus on the results of actions (e.g. utilitarian approaches such as minimizing suffering), while religious moralists tend to be guided by absolutes (some actions are objectively right or wrong). Interesting food for thought. The extent to which he’s right, and the significance if he is, could be the subject of a long and interesting discussion in and of itself.

[QUOTE=Dawkins]
As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is one reason why I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.
[/QUOTE]

One problem is that the word “faith” can mean different things. Dawkins’s point is a good one if by “faith” you mean blind faith, as in “You’ll just have to take it on faith.” But there are other things that having “faith” can mean. It can mean trust (including in cases where there are good reasons to trust). It can mean faithfulness (as in being faithful to one’s spouse, or to one’s duties). It can mean fidelity. It can mean believing something for reasons (which may, or may not, be good ones) that cannot be proven (perhaps because they are too personal or are at an intuitive or emotional or subconscious level). “Religious faith” could mean faith in any of these senses.

109

[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
I think we should all wince when we hear a small child bring labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase ‘Christian child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
[/QUOTE]
You can wince if you want to, but I’d just understand a phrase like that as being more or less analogous to something like “American child” or “Mexican child” or “Navajo child” or “Dawkins child”—or “Jewish child,” which is a particularly interesting example, since identifying a person as Jewish can refer to any or all of: their ethnic background, their cultural heritage, their religious beliefs, or their religious affiliation.

Whether or not it’s “brainwashing” to raise a child in a particular religion or to teach religious beliefs to young children has been extensively discussed in GD before, so I won’t address it here.

110

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Rather than systematically critique the last few chapters, I’ll just throw out some comments, criticisms, and reactions to some of the things Dawkins says in them, with the caveat that I’ll be out of town (and probably away from the internet) much of this coming week, so if I don’t respond promptly, that’s why.
[/quote]
Duly noted. :wink:

How so? That absolutism is just correlated with, not caused by, religious faith? The question then would be whether there is something in someone’s personality that makes them both amenable to religion and to absolutism. It might be interesting in that regard to look at people who’ve converted away from religion to athiesm to see if they still (assuming they did) harbour absolutist moral views.

I would say yes, but I think the absolutism comes from organised religion, not religion per se.

The nonsense that captures minds certainly need not be religious, but I don’t believe Dawkins is saying that only religious types get their heads filled with nonsense; just that with religion it is perhaps more common (i’m not sure i’d agree with this one, tbh. It’s devotion that causes that kind of problem, not devotion to religion specifically, and I would argue that that’s a problem with the person in question rather than the object of their belief, unless it’s been fostered).

But still all of those things shouldn’t inspire automatic respect. To go with Dawkins’ example, i’m sure that bin Laden has trust in the peopel who harbor him, exhibits faithfulness to them and his cause, and fidelity to his beliefs. I don’t believe we should automatically respect him for these things. To go further, I don’t believe that there is any quality or trait that should be granted automatic respect, religious or otherwise; devotion, honour, love, respect itself, open-mindedness; all of these are things which have downsides. I’m not saying that they are immediately suspect, but I wouldn’t see a person described as having any of these traits and think “Aha! I don’t need to know details; this person is a worthy person”.

Nothing is automatically sacrosanct (and the reverse is true, too). I do think that religious faith is automatically respected too much; look at that poll of American trustworthiness that pops up a lot; people are more willing to trust religious people, even people of different religions than they, more than athiests. We’re below even Muslims, a group you’d expect to get a considerable amount of bigoted mistrust by then.

111

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
You can wince if you want to, but I’d just understand a phrase like that as being more or less analogous to something like “American child” or “Mexican child” or “Navajo child” or “Dawkins child”—or “Jewish child,” which is a particularly interesting example, since identifying a person as Jewish can refer to any or all of: their ethnic background, their cultural heritage, their religious beliefs, or their religious affiliation.
[/quote]
With the exception of Dawkins and potentially Jewish, I wouldn’t think those are analogous at all. You’re an American child simply by being born in a certain place or to certain parents. It’s not a matter of belief or opinion. Religion, OTOH, is. To describe someone as a “Catholic child” or a “Dawkins child” or an “athiest child” can be quite true - I have little doubt that many children are Catholic, or atheist, though i’m not sure how many are brought up under the direct beliefs of Dawkins. But these are kids! Feel free to call them all these things, but they also believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and monsters under the bed. To call them those things as if they understand as much as adults, or that their Catholicism or athiesm or whatever is of a a higher class than their belief in the boogey monster is silly.

Fair enough.

112

[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
IT is amazing how many people seemingly cannot tell the difference between ‘X is true’ and ‘It is desirable that people should believe that X is true’. Or maybe they don’t really fall for this logical error, but simply rate truth as unimportant compared with human feelings. I don’t want to decry human feelings. But let’s be clear, in any particular conversation, what we are talking about: feelings, or truth. Both may be important, but they are not the same thing.
[/QUOTE]
I’m a little puzzled why he brings up feelings here. The distinction between ‘X is true’ and ‘It is desirable that people should believe that X is true’ is a distinction, not between truth and feelings, but between the truth of a belief and the effects or results of holding that belief (which may include, but are certainly not limited to, the feelings of the person holding the belief).

And a person who compounds the two, or who values the second over the first, may not be making a logical error; they may just belong to the philosophical school of Pragmatism.

I agree the distinction is a useful one and should be kept in mind. But I also think (and this may be one valid point behind Pascal’s wager) that, in cases whether we cannot know for sure whether something is true or false, in deciding whether to act as if it is true or to act as if it is false, we ought to consider, not only the probability that it is true, but also the consequences of acting as if it were true and of acting as if it were false (the “penalities for guessing wrong”).

[QUOTE=Dawkins]
There may be statistical evidence bearing on the relationship between happiness and belief (or unbelief), but I doubt if it is a strong effect, one way or the other.
[/QUOTE]
It would be interesting to see such evidence. I would want to know what particular beliefs correlate with happiness or unhappiness, not just whether a person claims affiliation with Christianity or Hinduism or atheism. I’d want to know, both what kind of effect a person’s beliefs had on that person’s own happiness or well-being, and what effect it influenced them to have on the people around them or the rest of the world.

And many people want, not just a happy life, but a meaningful one. It’s not just a matter of whether (or which) religion promotes happiness, but whether it provides meaning to life. Although I suppose you could get around that by defining happiness in such a way that a happy life must be a meaningful one.

[QUOTE=Dawkins]
I find it more interesting to ask whether there is any good reason to feel depressed if we live without God. I shall end this book by arguing, on the contrary, that it is an understatement to say that one can lead a happy and fulfilled life without supernatural religion.
[/QUOTE]
Can a person live a happy and fulfilled life without religion? The answer to that may be the same as to the question of whether a person can live a happy and fulfilled life without music (or sex, or friendship, or exposure to nature, or intellectual stimulation, or any of a dozen other things): some people can, others can’t. Some people can get along fine without music (or even have to get along without it, if they’re deaf, or tone deaf); they don’t even miss it. Others would find their life severely to moderately diminsihed, made poorer, missing something; in extreme cases they would have lost their reason to live.

113

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]

Chapter 9

You can wince if you want to, but I’d just understand a phrase like that as being more or less analogous to something like “American child” or “Mexican child” or “Navajo child” or “Dawkins child”—or “Jewish child,” which is a particularly interesting example, since identifying a person as Jewish can refer to any or all of: their ethnic background, their cultural heritage, their religious beliefs, or their religious affiliation.

Whether or not it’s “brainwashing” to raise a child in a particular religion or to teach religious beliefs to young children has been extensively discussed in GD before, so I won’t address it here.
[/QUOTE]

If it were true that the phrase is used analogously, i.e. simply to mean “a child born of Catholic parents”, you might have a point; indeed, one might go so far as to say it is equally horrible to indoctrinate a child in the ideology of the United States, Iran or France as it is to indoctrinate it in the ideology of Catholicism. That’s a different argument to worry about. I, for one, am a bit worried about the kind of overt patriotism that some nations indoctrinate their children with, leaving adults that truly, genuinely believe that there is something inherently special about their nation that everybody ought to realize as well. There’s never.

But on the other hand, you don’t have much of a choice in the simple label “American” or “German” as a national marker or “Navajo” as an ethnic marker. And the marker “Catholic” is usually not meant to say “Catholic parents made me”, but to indicate that that child should follow the doctrines of the Catholic church and get indoctrinated in its rites, and believe that its is the only saving religion there is.

I admit I am not as vociferously opposed to this as Dawkins is, mainly because I think that it’s a minor compared to religion’s other ills, and because the argument, as noted, could be extended to almost every part of childrearing.

That’s true, but ultimately pointless. In the end, religious faith has to boil down to blind faith – because the ultimate source of religious face is an unprovable, unmeasurable, quite frankly impossible entity called God. You can have religious trust in God; you can be faithful to God; you can certainly do that. But it all returns to the basic problem that you’re basing this all on your blind faith in the existence of God in the first place. It’s not even that blind faith is necessarily a bad thing, its just that when you hang too much onto that blind faith, it will eventually become bad.

114

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Nothing is automatically sacrosanct (and the reverse is true, too). I do think that religious faith is automatically respected too much
[/QUOTE]
I agree.

I think some of the reasons religious belief is over-respected may be
(1) people afford others’ religious beliefs the respect they want others to afford to theirs
(2) the beliefs are presented in such a way that it looks like the only alternative to respecting them is going to war (literally or metaphorically) over them
(3) a lot of people are unclear about what makes a belief worthy of respect

But I agree that religion is often over-respected just because it’s religion, and certainly that people who do dumb and/or evil things in the name of religion shouldn’t get a pass just because they invoke religion. (On the contrary, maybe they should be treated more harshly, for breaking one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God.” :wink: )

115

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
With the exception of Dawkins and potentially Jewish, I wouldn’t think those are analogous at all. You’re an American child simply by being born in a certain place or to certain parents. It’s not a matter of belief or opinion. Religion, OTOH, is.
[/QUOTE]
But religion isn’t just a matter of intellectual beliefs; it also involves a certain cultural heritage, membership in a community, etc., and it is those things that I associate with a child who is referred to as a “Christian child.”

116

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
But religion isn’t just a matter of intellectual beliefs; it also involves a certain cultural heritage, membership in a community, etc., and it is those things that I associate with a child who is referred to as a “Christian child.”
[/QUOTE]
I would tend to agree with you on cultural heritage, if it is a matter of “child as a result of this heritage” rather than “child believes in these cultural norms”, and I would say that membership requires adult acceptance, and say rather that a child is in such a community (more of a semantic difference, though).

I suppose it depends. Do you associate zero beliefs to a child when you refer to them as a “Christian child”? If so, fine by me. If not, I tend to disagree.

117

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
and I would say that membership requires adult acceptance, and say rather that a child is in such a community (more of a semantic difference, though).
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, when I used the word “membership” I had in mind the sense in which a newborn baby is a member of the family it’s born into, but that could be misleading. Many churches do in fact require a youngster to be old enough to understand what they’re accepting before they can choose to become a member of that church.

118

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Yeah, when I used the word “membership” I had in mind the sense in which a newborn baby is a member of the family it’s born into, but that could be misleading. Many churches do in fact require a youngster to be old enough to understand what they’re accepting before they can choose to become a member of that church.
[/QUOTE]
Sure. To put it in church terms, it’s baptism versus confirmation.

119

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Sure. To put it in church terms, it’s baptism versus confirmation.
[/QUOTE]
Depends on which church you’re talking about. The one I grew up in practices adult baptism, so that baptism marks the point at which you become a member.

120

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Depends on which church you’re talking about. The one I grew up in practices adult baptism, so that baptism marks the point at which you become a member.
[/QUOTE]
I looked up confirmation after I posted that, and in some cases that’s an automatic thing as well. So.. forget that analogy. :wink: