Why I Love Religion Part 2
A (for Atheist): Religion is bad. It is used by the powerful to keep the rest of us meek and subservient, so that they can get our money and other resources. It inspires people to commit hate crimes and religious wars, including acts of genocide. It acts as a cover for con-men not only to swindle people out of their money, but to commit terrible crimes, like raping minors and other forms of sexual impropriety. Meanwhile, those whom they have fooled are psychologically repressed to the point that they cannot achieve their perfectly harmless dreams and desires. It structurally both serves and protects, and is served and protected by, capitalism - to the point that the two systems are indistinguishable, and both are fully corrupted. But even if all of the above weren't true, it simply is a lie. It is therefore both intrinsically immoral in principle, and has catastrophic consequences, being uniquely responsible for a major amount of the suffering in the world. Religion should therefore be abolished.
B (for Believer): In order to say that anything is bad, you have to have some concept of the good. Religion is the source of that concept. Therefore, there is no standpoint from which one can judge that religion is bad.
A: But I do have a concept of the good!
B: One that came from religion!
A: Not really. One can say that a saw is bad, if the blade is broken, and it no longer cuts wood. One needn't get that idea from a holy book - one can just observe this, through the experience of sawing wood.
B: A saw can be good or bad for chopping wood.
A: Right. So?
B: A thing - a saw, for instance - can be good for a specific purpose, such as getting some chopped wood. That wood can be good for something, like building a house. That house can be good for something, like keeping its occupants warm. That warmth can be good, for a purpose, like keeping your children alive.
A: Yes, yes, yes. What's your point?
B: But what if there's no ultimate purpose? What if these chains of purpose go on forever - or, worse yet, what if they reach a dead end, and there's just nothing at the end? What if the last item in your list has no purpose? Then the things that you need to get that have no purpose, which would mean that the things you need in the chain before them have no purpose, which would mean that the things before them have no purpose, and so on and so on backwards until you get back to the wood and then the saw. And even if the saw is good at chopping wood, if there's no purpose to having wood, then the saw is worthless.
A: Hmm. Well, maybe the saw was a bad example.
B: It doesn't matter what you pick, as your example. Whatever exists in the universe must either have a purpose, or not. If it has a purpose, then that purpose must be either some other finite thing, or not. If it's another finite thing, that must have a purpose or not, which leads to another finite thing, or not. So if we only consider finite things, then we're either going to get chains of purposes which are infinitely long, or which come to a final item, then stop - either way, there's no ultimate purpose to them. Therefore, if there's an ultimate purpose to these finite things, it must be something infinite. Something that is intrinsically of greater purpose, and therefore greater worth, than all of the finite things in the universe. I call this infinite purpose God.
A: Wait... how is a single infinite being better than an infinite series of finite beings?
B: Its purpose is intrinsic, whereas a finite thing has its purpose outside of itself, in something else - and without that something else, it is, itself, worthless. In other words, the value of a saw, or any other finite material thing, is relative. Its worth only exists relative to something else. That's perfectly fine, for a practical, expedient tool like a saw. But if all you have are relative values, and no absolute value to ground them, they will collapse like a house of cards. You need to believe in some kind of infinite being in order to have an absolute grounding for relative values. For a stable concept of the good, you need to believe in an infinite being. Without any concept of the good, morality completely collapses. Therefore, not only is religion good, it is the source of all good and should be preserved.
C (for Conciliator): Sorry to interrupt, folks. I'm going to try to argue against both A and B, here. But first I want to say: neither of them are completely wrong - they both have a point - and they would both do well to listen to each others' arguments, and consider them deeply.
I'm going to try to convince you to be at least neutral about religion. But my reason for defending religion is different from B's reason. I don't think that religion is necessary for morality. I think that religion is essentially neutral with respect to morality - neither necessary for morality, nor necessarily immoral. But I think that religion should be preserved, as part of our cultural heritage. It's interesting - fascinating, even - and it's part of what makes us human. I love to learn about myths and legends. I'm especially interested in learning and maintaining the old religious traditions of the Native Americans.
Now in my argument here, I'm going to focus on B's argument, and I'm going to push back on it a little. But bear with me, B, because eventually I'll come back around to showing why this calls A's argument into question, as well. I'm not even trying to argue that B is completely wrong, exactly - I just want to point out a few things about B's argument.
The first thing I want to point out is that although A and B may seem, and may feel that they are, ideologically opposed to each other, they actually have far more in common than either of them would like to admit.
They both think that the problem is incorrect beliefs. One thinks that religious beliefs are bad and have bad consequences - immorality and suffering. The other thinks that religious beliefs - his own religious beliefs, presumably - are good, and are the source of good things - morality, and perhaps also happiness (although he didn't mention happiness, and it's not essential to his argument). But in both cases, they think that what really matters is beliefs - if people have the correct beliefs, morality is the result; if they have incorrect beliefs, immorality is the result. They merely differ on the question: what are the correct beliefs? (And we could bring several dozen other people out here, with different beliefs, and they would all be quite convinced that their own beliefs are the correct beliefs and lead to morality.)
My position is quite different. I don't think that correct beliefs are really the most important thing for morality. I say: if you want to make a better world, instead of trying to change people's beliefs, focus on changing practices, and institutions - and let people believe whatever they want.
Take an anthropology class, and the professor will quite likely, early on in the course, warn her students against making WEIRD assumptions: here, WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Many anthropologists come from cultures that are thoroughly WEIRD, and thus are filled with faulty preconceptions and prejudices when they go to study a non-WEIRD society. In order to understand a non-WEIRD society, it's often necessary to unlearn a lot of WEIRD ideas and unconscious tendencies.
My point here is that A's argument and B's argument are both profoundly WEIRD. I don't think very many people would disagree with me when I say that A is WEIRD, but I want to stress here that what I am saying is that A's philosophical argument is very WEIRD - not that atheism is WEIRD, per se. There have certainly been non-western societies that have developed atheism, long before the emergence and ascendance of capitalism. We hear, for instance, of the Nastika traditions in ancient India, which were, at least according to certain sources, atheistic - though, since we mostly only hear about these ancient philosophies from their enemies, it's hard to know whether we are getting an accurate report. According to other traditions, it's not so much that the Nastika did not believe in a God or Gods, but rather that they had no concept of self - or perhaps that they rejected the Vedas, or interpreted the Vedas differently than mainstream tradition. Later, certain forms of Samkhya seem to have been non-theistic, and there are non-theistic forms of Buddhism as well. But my point is that these forms of atheism (if "atheism" is the right term for them) had very different kinds of arguments and cultural foundations for their atheism than the kind of argument we hear from A, above. A's argument arose specifically in the 18th and 19th centuries, under the conditions of the development of industrial capitalism.
But it's worth emphasizing that B's argument also is a very, very modern idea. Indeed, it is unbiblical, and even profoundly contrary to scripture. I don't want to get too far into the pedigree of B's argument - it has a long complex history, with many surprising twists and turns. For now, I'll say that it vaguely resembles ideas found in the philosophy of Aristotle, who lived centuries before Jesus, and, being Greek, had absolutely nothing to do with the Hebrew scriptures - but actually Aristotle never makes this argument exactly. Our next stop in this whirlwind tour of the history of ideas is St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Christian theologian, who was deeply influenced by Aristotle. Now we're getting a little closer to the argument that B made, but there are still profound differences between Thomas Aquinas and B. Aquinas's argument, to make a very long story ridiculously short, is that all substances seek their own perfection, and good is the same as being; he thus makes a complex distinction between substantial being and relative being. I don't think B even believes that all substances seek their own perfection, or that good is the same as being, so clearly the two arguments are not the same at all, but at least they sort of rhyme.
You don't really get B's argument in the form that B argued it until the arrival of German Idealism - or, more accurately, watered-down versions of German Idealism for a more popular audience, which started appearing in the 19th century. After Kant, many thinkers were trying to complete the system of idealism, each in their own way: most famously, Fichte attempted to ground the system in the self-positing I, and Schelling tried to ground it in Nature, and there were many others, especially among the "Romantic" philosophers. Some of these approach B's argument in various ways, but not quite. One way to discuss the origins of B's argument is to say that, in a way, it's an inversion of a misinterpretation of Nietzsche. Nietzsche used to argue about the "death of God". To over-simplify Nietzsche's rather poetic (and perhaps somewhat ironic) argument, you could say that in Nietzsche's opinion, after society was no longer fundamentally shaped by adherence to a system of morals rooted in theistic religion, society would become unmoored and would face a profound crisis in meaning. B's argument here is a religious inversion of Nietzsche's argument, essentially asserting that morality is based on God - without God, everyone would be immoral. (This is a bit like that famous quote, misattributed to Dostoevsky, that "If there is no God, then everything is permitted.") Its origins are, as I say, distantly related to Aristotle and Aquinas, far closer to ideas from the 19th century, and then they were popularized in 20th century, especially by Evangelical Christian apologists.
What can we say about this notion that, without belief in the Judeo-Christian God, morality is impossible? First of all, that it is obviously objectively false - plenty of people who did not and do not believe in the modern monotheist concept of God, in which an absolute, omnipotent, eternal being grounds moral absolutes, have nonetheless been perfectly capable of being ethical, and have even developed complex systems. Indeed, the monotheists like Aquinas got their ethics from the pagans like Aristotle - not the other way around.
Now, I'm not sure that's actually true, from the perspective of a scientific, psychological understanding of how ethics works in human brains. (I have to admit that B's argument somehow feels right. I'm not sure why B's argument feels right. That, too, is a subject for psychological research.) But, for the sake of argument, let's just assume that B's argument is correct.
If we assume that B is right, then a kind of analogy immediately opens up for us: the dynamo (the "starry dynamo in the machinery of night" as Allen Ginsberg says). God is like a power source, that makes the entire machinery of ethical reasoning function.
But this analogy points out both the strengths and the weaknesses of B's argument. Again, let's assume that B is somehow correct, that ethical reasoning could not "get started" without the motive force of belief in an omnipotent God. The concept of God is conceived here something like a battery - an energy source, that keeps the machinery of ethical reasoning functioning. But once we conceive of things according to this rather strange metaphor, it suddenly becomes obvious to us that it is possible to "swap out" the batteries. In fact, this is what a lot of people do. People believe in a God, according to one religion, which serves (apparently) as that fundamental wellspring of all of their values in their life and everything that they believe in - and then they convert to a different religion, which may have quite a different concept of God, which works just as well, and changes almost nothing about their moral reasoning. We find this phenomenon happening quite often when someone wants to marry someone else from a different religious tradition: they go through a religious conversion process - Jewish to Hindu, Mormon to Muslim, Sikh to Presbyterian or what have you, and then they quite happily pick up their lives where they left off, with relatively few changes. Maybe they wear different clothes, eat different foods, celebrate different holidays and so forth, but rarely are their ethical beliefs about what is right and wrong fundamentally changed. They don't start believing that rape is good, or that random murder is justified. Indeed, even when we consider quite complex ethical judgements - say, about finding the right balance between right to privacy and freedom of expression, or how much of our tax money should go to foreign aid, or whether it's right to keep a secret or to spread gossip about a friend who has addiction or substance abuse issues - it's remarkable how often our moral judgements about such questions remain relatively unchanged by the conversion experience. Isn't that... odd? Doesn't it imply that, even if we were to grant B's argument that the ultimate source of morality comes from a distant, absolute (divine) source, that, nonetheless, the overwhelmingly vast majority, the meat and substance, of our moral reasoning occurs in our own own limited human minds?
We have been considering the positions of A, B, and C, so far. Let's bring in another perspective:
D (for Devil): There is no God! Therefore there's no morality! I can do whatever I want! Rape, bestiality, murder, here I come! Woo hoo!
The first thing I want to emphasize (I'm continuing to argue from C's perspective, here) is that D not Nietzsche. This is what I meant earlier when I said that B's argument is a kind of inverted form of a misinterpretation of Nietzsche. Nietzsche's argument is much more subtle and nuanced. Nonetheless, for the sake of this argument, let's consider D - which is not only D for Devil, it's also D for Dumb.
What both B and D get wrong is that they seem to think that without an absolute grounding of morality in a transcendent, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being, morality is totally relative and can therefore be anything and everything, including completely inverted beliefs, such as the belief that rape and murder are good. What both B and D miss is that, despite the wide abundance of diversity of beliefs in the supernatural, the metaphysical, gods, heavens, myths, dreamtimes, myths, legends, etc., etc., that people have held and continue to hold, and will hold all over the world, there are nonetheless surprising regularities in our moral reasoning.
Don't get me wrong - there are important differences between moral codes, and between ethical theories. But even if we accept that moral reasoning needs some kind of fundamental force to get it going, once it gets going, it usually, after a certain number of generations, arrives at some remarkably similar principles. Often the memes evolve into something that in some way resembles the famous "golden rule": "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Not a perfect formula for ethical reasoning, but a reasonably good guide, a lot of the time, as untold billions of people have noticed. (It's not immediately apparent how having a powerful glowing old man with a beard on a throne telling you this helps, except perhaps at a psychological level.) So apparently, whatever the motivating force is at the origin of human ethical reasoning, the result at the end of this reasoning is (pretty close to) the same. Which makes you wonder how important that force at the origin was, after all.
So, let's get back to the argument between A and B. B's point is that A's argument depends on moral preconceptions that are religious - and specifically Judeo-Christian - in origin, whether A admits it or not. But does it? As we have seen, B's own argument is ultimately derived from an Aristotelian argument, and Aristotle obviously was neither Christian nor Jewish, and in his argument, religion does not play the preponderant role in the formation of morality. Even if B is correct that something is needed to get the whole mechanism of ethical reasoning going, two questions are getting confused, here:
Question 1: What is the metaphysical grounding of ethics?
Question 2: What motivates us to behave morally?
They are both important, interesting questions, but they don't have much to do with each other.
They would be two different ways of asking the same question, if human beings were perfectly rational beings, primarily motivated in our everyday actions by the ultimate metaphysical truths about the universe. But that's not how human beings are. It could very well be that either:
Possibility 1: Humans have sufficient metaphysical grounding to warrant truly good moral behavior, and yet, because of our irrationality, we nonetheless misbehave; OR,
Possibility 2: From a rational perspective, there is no ultimate metaphysical grounding for morality, but because humans are motivated irrationally, we nonetheless are motivated to obey what are ultimately arbitrary moral laws.
Note that even if possibility 2 is the case, and moral laws are ultimately somewhat arbitrary, nonetheless, they aren't completely arbitrary. A society that encouraged everyone to murder everyone else at all times simply wouldn't last very long, and would have wiped itself out long ago. Thus we can predict that there would be a kind of quasi-natural selection process that would eliminate the most irrational and self-destructive kinds of moral laws, while retaining a certain variance among existing societies vis-a-vis some of the details of moral theory.
Note also that even if humans were completely rationally motivated by transcendent truths, just what these truths might be remains a mystery. Which is of course the point. "God knows." (See also: The Problem of the Guy Named Bill.) These truths are, presumably, too big for our finite minds to handle. But that means that functionally, for us, it is a kind of empty slot - almost anything can go in there. Some of the grounding beliefs that could fit in might be called "religious". Some might be called "atheist". Still others are difficult to categorize (see, for Buddhism, which has non-theist varieties).
B: Well, this is just a long way of proving me right! Your moral argument lacks metaphysical grounding, A!
A: Yes but your position lacks metaphysical grounding, too!
B: It does not!
A: Does too!
B: No! My morality is grounded in God! The ultimate metaphysical grounding!
A: Well where does God get His metaphysical grounding?
B: He just has it!
A; Says who?
B: Says me!
A: There it is! It's just the argument from authority!
B: Right! God's authority!
A: No, your authority.
B: I am nothing; I am merely a vessel.
A: Well, tell me this, vessel. Even if God somehow had ultimate metaphysical grounding, what would be the grounding of your knowledge of God?
B: I... uh... I just know it. It's faith. You wouldn't understand.
A: Well, why can't I skip the God part, and have faith in my secular moral principles, that you don't understand?
B: You clearly do.
A: So, then, we're even.
B: I guess.
C: Yes, we're all even. And it's not just our moral laws for which we cannot see their metaphysical grounding, whether we believe in God or not - it's everything. What is the metaphysical grounding of math? What is the metaphysical grounding of logic? We don't know what the metaphysical grounding of a tree is, any better than we know the metaphysical grounding of justice. We're all dancing on the same mystery.
A and B [in unison]: WHAT ARE YOU DOING, C? YOU CAN'T BE A CONCILIATOR! THERE IS NO CONCILIATION BETWEEN ATHEISM AND BELIEF! EITHER A THING EXISTS, OR IT DOESN'T! EITHER GOD EXISTS, OR GOD DOES NOT EXIST! YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS!
C: Oh, A, B, and D, you're all just figments of my imagination.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
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