A few days back, Andrew Brown at the Grauniad posted a little article under the unpromising heading, "Scepticism gets you only so far. Even nonbelievers need to have faith."
Yes, I can already hear the groans and mutterings of "Oh no, not that old saw again" from the back row. And yes, Gentle Reader, it is that old saw again.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't try to imply that Mr Brown is some kind of fundamentalist loon, convinced that the Bible is literally true in every jot and tittle, that The Evil Gay Illuminati™ are to blame for everything from a stubbed toe to an earthquake, and that Adam and Eve spent their evenings joyriding on Spiky, their pet triceratops. On the contrary, he's a warm, liberal, fair-minded, intelligent man, who can definitely sling a pleasingly well-formed sentence together; and what's more, usually—on any topic but the one in hand—manages to construct an argument free of fallacies or fuzzy thinking. On most topics, even if I disagree with him, I usually find that, as it were, we're travelling in the same direction and merely disagreeing over the route. But, like many religious people, straddling the whole spectrum from whacko fundy to whatever the complete absence of whacko-fundiness is called, he seems to struggle somewhat with the idea that atheists don't have a "god-shaped hole" in their minds, which just has to be filled with some sort of spirituality.
That atheists, to put it another way, are actually atheists.
So, anyway, the article in question…
He starts off well enough. Both he and I agree with Kwame Anthony Appiah that people tend to mould their interpretation of scripture to their pre-existing ideas on morals, philosophy, politics, etc, rather than the reverse. A person who takes a dim view of women, for instance, will then go on to agree with Paul that women should stay silent in church. A person who isn't a misogynistic prig, on the other hand, will… erm, agree with Paul that it's perfectly fine for women to speak up.
We also agree that this ability of scripture to be endlessly reinterpreted is a major reason why religions survive the test of changing circumstances. If there were only one possible interpretation which couldn't be changed to comply with newly discovered facts or radically new societal ideals, the scripture would rapidly become useless as a source of inspiration or guidance for any but the most stubborn fringe of buriers of heads in sand.
He and I also agree that such belief can be personally useful as a source of strength and inspiration for the believers. Though I have to say that I don't think his choice of the AA (the drink one, not the vehicular one) makes for as good an example as he seems to think; but that would be a lengthy digression. His point still stands. Many believers find that belief in a higher power of some kind gives them something to mentally draw upon in times of hardship.
(I suspect Mr Brown wouldn't agree with me that the widespread reliance on unevidenced higher powers has a net bad effect on society, regardless of individual plusses; but that would also be a digression.)
He ends his use of AA as an example with…
AA doesn't work for everyone: no single belief or practice could. But the one thing it does demand is that people believe in it, and bet on it, even if they are flexible about the content of that belief.
Which is fine, but the comfortable cuddle of agreement ends, as he finishes the paragraph with:
Sceptical irony will carry you only so far.
Well, sorry but no. The need for a belief in a higher power if the AA treatment is to work merely means that those of a sceptical bent won't find this approach useful. It's simply flat-out wrong to imply that because a sceptic won't find the one treatment of any use, they won't have better luck with another.
And why "irony"? In what way is a sceptical viewpoint an ironic viewpoint? Granted, irony may be employed when expressing that, or any, worldview, but it isn't mandatory. This comes across as nothing more than a snippet of cheap snark.
And the next paragraph is, frankly, horrifying.
And that is the great thing that Appiah's lecture gets wrong. He has far too much faith in reasoned scepticism. Although it is true that religions can survive only if they are flexible and pragmatic, they can work only if they seem to believers to be fixed and eternal. Who would bother to die, or kill, or even to live, for common sense?
Why on Earth is it a good thing that people would be or are willing to die or kill for any system of thought? In order to defend a society, yes, but surely, isn't killing for ideals the very definition of "radical," in the now-common religious context?
And if you live for a worldview, you're doing philosophy wrong. A worldview, in the philosophical, political or religious sense, is something you live by. It is your servant, your guide, your moral compass. It serves you. You don't serve it, even if you imagine yourself to be serving its supernatural author.
I'd also note that Mr Brown would appear to be saying, "Well, I can intellectually handle the fact that these ideas are actually plastic and mutable, but all those other people won't be able to, and so need to think they aren't." I don't think it's what he intended or even that that's how he framed it in the privacy of his head, but it's what his words amount to.
He continues:
I was present at the lecture, as a sort of invited heckler, and when he had finished I asked him how we should reconcile the knowledge that religions are constantly changing with the need to believe that they put us in touch with eternal truths.
His answer, to general laughter, was that this wasn't his problem. But it is
No, it is not his (Mr Appiah's) problem. Mr Appiah isn't claiming that there is even such a thing as an "eternal truth" in the sense—that of an absolute, unchanging, externally-imposed morality—meant by Mr Brown. The onus is clearly on the person who believes in such a thing, to show how their other contentions are compatible with it.
The difficulty of placing eternal and absolute truths into secular frameworks remains, whatever your truths are.
And here I think I owe Mr Brown an apology. When I commented under the article, I questioned the idea that multiple "truths" are even possible, thinking he meant it in the sense of "multiple people's contradictory truths are equally valid." That's a fallacy oft-uttered by religious folk, but on reading it this time, I think he mean it in the sense of "whatever truth-claims we choose to use as examples."
That said, as stated above, this problem only exists for those who believe in such absolute truths. But given that we have a sample of just one sentient social species (ourselves) to study, it seems to me to be hubris of the first water to claim any such thing as an absolute moral or philosophical truth by extension. A sentient lion—or alien analogue thereof—might quite justifiably tell you to go jump off a cliff for lecturing him on the immorality of killing the male young in his newly-conquered pride. Possibly there's a species on a planet orbiting some distant star who would view us as being disgustingly, immorally, overprotective of our children; and I'm sure we'd be just as morally repulsed at seeing them dump their toddlers in the nearest jungle to let natural selection take its course. I can certainly imagine a species to whom cannibalism of one's dead friends and relatives is not only normal, but a polite and dignified way to honour their passing. (Thank you, Robert Heinlein, for that one.) Let's not put ourselves in the position of Shaw's Britannius; "Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
Anyways…
If liberal democracy and human rights are just contingent preferences, they lose all their moral force. They turn out to be like money: if people don't believe in them, they have neither use nor value.
Taking human rights first. I cannot think of a way which a social species could organise itself without paying some attention to [name of species] rights. Certainly human societies over the millennia seem to have had such a concept. They've often been extremely skewed, and have denied some or all rights to a large percentage of the population, but for those who have had them, they've been vigorously, often violently, defended and protected. But given part of the definition of "social" is that it involves a trade off between rights and responsibilities within a group, it seems to me that the basic concept is hardwired into us by evolution, rather than extended to us by a "higher power."
To liberal democracy, who sneaked the word "liberal" in there? "Liberal" anything is (sadly) not even anywhere like universally believed to be a truth, even in the major democracies. It might well be Mr Brown's preferred choice, it might be mine, but the proof that it really is a preference and may thus lose "moral force" (which I assume to mean a blend of efficacy and power-to-persuade) would seem to lie in the fact that it has very recently lost a great deal of such force in consequence of people not deeming it valuable.
Nor is democracy (liberal or not), so far as I can see, the shining beacon of moral goodness that I would expect from an eternal and absolute system of morals. Especially if we imagine it being handed us by a benevolent, all-powerful higher being. It's highly susceptible to gaming by bad actors, such as a dishonest and/or biased press (who apparently aren't affected or guided by this "absolute" system) or ditto politicians. It's remarkably easy for it to produce a tyranny of the majority. And, well, look at some of the people voted into power. Geedubbya Bush, Maggie Thatcher, Ronnie Reagan, Richard Nixon… the list goes on; though at the risk of someone shouting "Godwin," we should also note that Hitler was elected. And it's come close to putting a certain Donald Trump into office. (Hopefully "close" is all he'll achieve.) (Oh, and it is not "Leader of the free world." Barring "White man's burden," I have yet to come across a less apt and more conceited, self-aggrandising term.)
It's not that I can see any better system, absent the fabled, highly unlikely and probably very unstable even if it could be momentarily produced, "benevolent dictatorship." If I could, believe me, I'd be writing about that, not Mr Brown's column. I'm just not silly enough to see democracy as anything but a least-bad. And, as a social animal with instincts evolved for small, closely interrelated groups, attempting to cope with the huge groups we now deal with, "least-bad" is quite possibly the best we can ever achieve; but to stop striving for better, merely because we've decided that the system we have is a built-in, unalterable property of the universe, seems to me to be little more than intellectual and moral cowardice.
Nor do I understand why it makes such ideas worth less (or, indeed, worthless), merely because we used our collective intellect to work them out on our own. Empathy—the ability to imagine someone else's feelings—seems to be an evolved characteristic of our species, and we have an imagination which allows us to guess how we'd feel in this or that situation. Put the two together, and the Golden Rule pops out. That gives us the basis of a system of morals which needs no recourse to instructions from on high:
At the very least, try not to cause unnecessary and avoidable harm. (Because we know being harmed feels bad.)
Attempt to alleviate harm when we see it. (Ditto.)
Attempt to increase wellbeing where we can. (Because we know that it makes us feel good.)
Obviously, it's not that simple. There's trade-offs and disagreements about which rights should take precedence in this or that situation, and tangled knots where we have not only two competing priorities, but Tom, Dick, Harry and the dog's auntie, all pulling in different directions. No one said it was easy. But the ideas come from us, not from some nebulous higher power, or as some kind of invisible field of truthiness pervading the universe. And because we create them, we can erase them, partially or wholly. Should our society deem them useless or outmoded, they will indeed disappear into the nothingness from whence they came. If the new ideas which replace them are better—create more wellbeing and less harm—then the society is a progressive one; if worse, regressive.
You can look as hard as you like. You won't find democratium, rightsium, justicium or fairium anywhere on the periodic table. These things are not properties of the universe, waiting to be mined from the ground or distilled from the oceans and put to use, much as we might like them to be.
And then he closes the article thusly:
It turns out that even unbelievers, if they want to preserve the freedom to doubt, must learn to believe in that freedom beyond where the evidence takes us.
Which looks like nought but the oft-repeated assertion that "Atheism is a religion," until we pair it with the line which he opened the argument with, like this:
He has far too much faith in reasoned scepticism. … It turns out that even unbelievers, if they want to preserve the freedom to doubt, must learn to believe in that freedom beyond where the evidence takes us.
And then it becomes nothing but word-play. In "faith in reasoned scepticism," the definition of "faith," from context, is "trust." Now, "belief," can indeed be a synonym for "trust," but that's not the meaning employed here. In context, "learn to believe in that freedom beyond where the evidence takes us" uses "believe" as in "I believe this to be true." You can't have trust in freedom because freedom is a concept; it has no ability to act—but you can believe that freedom exists.
Nor do any of the intermittent arguments establish that belief in a "fixed and eternal" moral framework is necessary in order to think up desirable guidelines for moral behaviour. In the end this argument was yet another iteration of "You can't have morals without God." Which, when posed as it was here, is more tiresome and clichéd than anything, but it also carries the sting that when it's posed by more fundamentalist types it's almost always an accusation that because atheists don't obey God, they have no morals. And that's just bloody insulting. But in either case, one has to ask: where are your morals with God? I look around me and I see clerics raping children. I see radicalised members of nearly all religions killing each other and any bystanders who get in the way, with absolutely no moral restrictions on their actions. I see schools filling children's heads with pseudoscience and bigotry. I see people being harassed, bullied and killed for their sexuality. I see witch burning. I see rampant denials of reality which may well aid in the rendering of this planet unfit for human life.
Where is the "fixed truth" in all this? All it seems to show, to me, is that—as Jacob Bronowski pointed out in the video I posted the other day—human beings are never so inhumane as when they believe that they have certain knowledge that theirs is the One And Only True Way. Far from there being a "need to believe that religions put us in touch with eternal truths," I would submit that there's a pressing need to disillusion people of that very belief.
—Daz
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