Philosophy Talk: The Blog

The Philosophical Legacy of Charles Darwin

Today our topic is Darwin's Philosophical Legacy and our guest is the one man in best suited to help think this through. That would be Dan Dennett, author of many books inspired by Darwinian ideas. Dennett thinks that Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection is both the single best idea that anyone has every had about life and how it works and also a deeply unsettling even "dangerous" idea. You can join the conversation by posting to this open blog entry.

The Post-Modern Family Values: Open Blog Entry

posted by Ken Taylor

It's pledge week on KALW, our host station.  And we're doing a live pledge show that will only be heard on that station and not on our affiliates  around the country.  But if you'd like to tune it, you can do so at 10am PST time, on KALW's Website  where the show is streamed live.   Join the conversation.   Of course, even if you can't hear a broadcast version of the show,  we will eventually put the streaming version up on our own  website, from which you can also purchase an downloadable version.

A couple of weeks ago, I started an open blog entry on pornography, so I thought I'd do the same for the Post-Modern Family.  Our guest today will be sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld, author of a The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions and the Changing American Family.   I've only read a bit of it,  but what I have read is fascinating.   He argues that increase in  same sex and interracial unions in America is due largely to the occurrence of a relatively new "life-stage"  -- the age of independence, he calls it -- during which young adults are single, co-mingled with one another in colleges, universities, and the work-force,  and, most importantly,  mostly free of their parents.   That's because more and more people go off to college in young adulthood, and go into the workforce at an age when earlier generations of their age cohort were living with or near their parents.  That gave earlier generations of parents more influence over their offsprings mate choices.   But that's been lost with the gradual rise of the age of independence as a distinctive life stage.    

As a sociological, demographic thesis this strikes me as extremely plausible and I doubt either John or I will challenge  Michael on that score.  But my question is what does this mean about the role of the family in society.   One used to think of a family as one of the primary means of transmitting values from generation to generation.   One might have thought, in fact, that that is one of the primary things that family is for.  Of course, it has other functions -- providing for its members daily material and psychological needs prime among them.   It also inculcates a system of binding ties between the old and the young such that the old care for the young in their age of dependency in such a way that the young feel permanently bound to the old and out of love and affection, more than mere "duty"  return the favor when the old are very old.    Families also traditionally provided central ingredients of our self-narratives -- the narratives in the telling of which we constitute ourselves thick identities, as particular people, with particular life stories. 

But can a family structure  which so radically weakens the normative ties between generations really do that identity constituting, value transmitting,  generation binding work? 

That's one of the questions I'd like to discuss with MIchael on the air.  

We'd love to have your input.    Leave a comment on this blog or call in or send us an e-mail.  

gotta run.

Clayton's Afterthoughts

posted by Phil Clayton

Dear Ken,

Thanks for your post this morning about reasons for (and against) belief in God. And thanks to you and John for having me on the show this morning.

A few very brief responses to today’s program on "Believing in God" and to your blog:

* Did we resolve the issue, either by agreeing that there are rationally compelling reasons for the existence of God, or rationally compelling reasons against God’s existence? No, clearly not. But then again, none of us thought that we would do so.

* Did we talk about religious issues – issues of ultimate concern – in a rational and civilized manner, despite the deep differences between our three positions? Yes, I think we did actually. Now perhaps some would say that’s not much of an achievement. But I disagree. In a world in which people are willing to commit violent acts because of the presence or absence of belief, and a world where religion seems to be the one topic that no one (even professional philosophers) can discuss rationally, I think that’s no mean achievement.

* Indeed, isn’t that what philosophy is all about? We take on issues that can’t be resolved by scientific study or direct observation -- issues that others seem willing to resolve by dogmatic assertions -- and we try to be influenced in our believing and disbelieving by the force of the better reason. I am a theist, which I suppose makes me religious. Yet if the reasons that I have for this belief turn out to be inadequate, I will follow where the arguments lead. And I presume the same is true of you.

* (Of course, none of us do this perfectly. Believing and disbelieving religious claims seems to be one of the areas most resistant to reason. [The other one is falling in love with those you "should" fall in love with and not with those you shouldn’t.] Perhaps you need to do a show on "the failure of philosophy" -- on what the Greeks called akrasia, the failure of the will to follow what reason tells us is the best course of action.)

* What we didn’t get to talk about – perhaps this is an even more urgent topic for a future show – is exactly how one goes about reasoning about one’s "worldview-level beliefs." Surely we have to admit that the hold of reason is rather less firm at this level than at the level of our more specific beliefs. And yet philosophers – and indeed all rational persons – are compelled to at least attempt to reason about their worldview-level beliefs.

* Reflection at this sort of level is what the tradition has called metaphysics. It comes in many flavors: theistic, of course, but also naturalistic, physicalist, humanist, etc. Unfortunately, metaphysics – at least in the "grand tradition" that once played a central role in Western philosophy – has sort of fallen out of fashion. It’s too bad, in a sense, because human reflection does tend to move outward to these broadest of all questions. Those are the questions that we began to discuss today. I wish we’d be able to delve into them more deeply. Maybe next time...

Philip Clayton

How Can Smart People Still Believe in God?

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show will be about the question whether it's still possible for smart, reflective people, fully cognizant with 21st century science, fully aware of the horrors of modernity, to believe in god.

Clearly the answer is -- drum roll, please -- yes. Many smart, reflective scientifically literate people obviously still do believe in god. Thankfully (or unthankfully, depending on your perspective) religious belief is not merely the province of anti-scientific, anti-modern fundamentalists who take every word, comma and period in some sacred text -- like the Bible or the Koran -- to be the sole and authoritative truth about just about everything.

So we thought it would make for interesting philosophical radio to find an intelligent, thoughtful, scientifically-minded true believer and probe in depth the basis of his belief. We did someting similar from the other side awihle back. Then we took an intelligent, scientifically-minded atheist, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong, and probed the basis of his disbelief. You can think of this one as giving equal time to the theist. Our guest will be Philip Clayton, of the Claremont Graduate University. It should be fun -- a good way to spend a Sunday Morning.

Below the fold, I'll try to get the juices flowing by thinking aloud about three different possible bases for enduring religious belief in a scientific age, filled with moral horrors of all kinds.

As a philosopher, I tend to want my beliefs to be based on either direct experience or reasoned arguments. Even if some belief of mine is not in fact so based, I like to flatter myself that all my current beliefs are capable of being, as it were, ratified by either some reasoned argument or by the testimony of direct experience. And I'd like to think that if it were to be decisively settled that some belief of mine could not be so , I would more or less spontaneously surrender that belief, more or less without regret or remorse or wishful thinking of any kind. It seems to me one could and should have much the same attitude toward religious belief. One should want to believe in the existence of god only if one is confident that such belief is capable of being ratified by either reasoned argument or direct experience.

Now there are lots of what purport to be reasoned arguments for the existence of god. The argument from design, the ontological argument, arguments from fine-tuning, and on and on. But two things about those arguments strike me. I don't think any one of them is at all rationally compelling. At the very least, an atheist can, I think, argue the theist to a stand-still with counterarguments. If you start out neutral with respect to god and try to reason your way to his existence by appeal to any of the traditional philosophical arguments, you just aren't going to get all the way to positive belief, in my humble opinion. And that I think is the very best that can be said for traditional arguments for the existence of god.

The very worst that can be said for them is that they are all demonstrably invalid and incapable of compelling rational belief in the existence of god. And if the worst that can be said is true, then that seems to suggest that belief in god is a form of unreason.

But here's the thing. I don't think the real basis of most believers' belief even purports to be anything like reasoned argument. I mean I don't think I've ever met a single person who's been talked out of belief by the failure of any of the traditional philosophical arguments or who's been talked into belief by the success of those arguments. Does that mean that most believers are unreasoning? Well, some surely are. But I'm not prepared to say that most or all are.

What then is the basis of belief in rational, intelligent, reflective, scientifically literate thinking people in the modern age? Direct experience of god's presence in the world, perhaps?

A good friend of mine sometimes talks that way about god. He -- my friend -- is a very good person. He recently went to Guatamala, I think it was, to help his church build some houses for the desparately poor people who live in a rural village there. I recall hearing him say something to the effect that he had never felt the presence of god so clearly as on that trip. I think many believers have thoughts like this. They think they experience the concrete effects of god's presence in their own lives or operating through others. When I came closest to sincere belief in my own life, it was because my very devout then girlfriend was a luminously good person. Her religious conviction seemed to me to light up her soul. Certainly her belief was partly responsible for leading her to do many, many good and caring things. I had never met a person quite like her and I really wanted and tried to believe as she believed.

In the end, though, I found that although I admired her goodness and wanted to emulate it to the small extent that I could, I could not bring myself to believe as she believed -- no argument and no experience was sufficient to bring me to belief. Though she perhaps felt god's presence in the world and took herself to be responding to it with her goodness and caring, somehow she was unable to bring me to feel god's presence. Perhaps that's just the way it is. Some people feel it and others don't. And there's not much one can do to get another across the divide.

The problem with the direct perception of god's presence is that even those who profess to directly perceive or feel god's presence in the world, have to confess that god makes his presence felt pretty sporadically and selectively. If I had been a jew in Hitler's concentration camp, or an innocent, peaceful and devout Shia Muslim in Saddam's Iraq or any sort of peace loving believer in the current chaotic and deadly Iraq, I would long for greater signs of god's presence and for greater signs of his love and wisdom. I know that some religious traditions condemn such longings as prideful and arrogant. But even believers must admit that so often, in the darkest hour, in the hour of most need, the voice of god goes silent, his hand is stilled and his face disappears as if behind a dark veil.

Now some believers will admit that arguments run out, that experience is insufficient to dispel doubt. And yet, still they believer. But on what basis?

Some turn to pure faith, grounded in neither reason nor direct experience. But making a leap of ungrounded faith seems tantamount to jumping off a cliff, intending to reach a supposed other side that you have no grounds whatsoever for believing even exists. That, I think, is an act of pure desparation. Is religious belief really such?

At this point, some believers might choose to turn quasi-fictionalist. This seemed to be something like what Howie Wettstein in our show about the meaning of life was getting at. Wettstein posits god as a kind of "cosmic partner." He sees positing god as a way of endowing life with meaning. Doing so enables one to see one's own life as part of a great cosmic drama. Wettstein would prefer to live under the guise of living out a cosmic drama than to live under the guise of living an utterly meaningless life in a universe utterly devoid of meaning.

The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that if you take yourself to be positing god merely in order to endow one's life with meaning and you do so with no rational basis for really and truly believing that god exists, then you seem to be engaging in a kind of pretense. But I wonder whether mere pretense is really enough to endow our lives with meanings that they don't already have. If mere pretense is enough, why can't we just decide to see our lives as meaningful in the first place, and skip the positing of god in whom we don't really believe.

I don't pretend to have answers to all these questions. Plus it's about 7:30 and I have to be in the studio in an hour and half. So I better stop now. I think we'll have lots to talk about. Phil is a lively and thoughtful guy. So it should be fun.

See you soon.

The Nature of Science and the ID Debate

posted by Peter Godfrey-Smith

The question "what is science?" always becomes more pressing when debates about evolution and creationism are going on. Even though the question is actually a bit of a mess, it suddenly becomes tempting to try to offer a short, concise description of science that can be used to guide decisions about what should and should not go onto high school curricula. Often, the first thing people draw on is Karl Popper's account of science, based on the idea of falsifiability. For Popper, a hypothesis is scientific only if it has the potential to be refuted by some possible observation. There are serious problems with this formula, and hardly any philosophers would accept anything as simple as this. It is a fantasy to think that big theoretical ideas in science are set up in such a way that they can be knocked out, with logical certainty, if some single crucial observation is found. For example, all scientific ideas, especially the big theoretical ones, only make predictions about observations when assumptions are made about many other matters (for example, the experimental apparatus and the circumstances of observation). But no one has come up with a reasonably simple alternative formula to Popper's one that does much better. So is it hopeless to try to say something simple and general about how science differs from other kinds of inquiry? What should philosophers say when judges in court cases (like the recent one in Pennsylvania) are looking for a way of deciding whether a controversial idea counts as genuine science?

To me, Popper was onto the right general idea, but he simplified the story too much. He also tried to express his test for science in terms of a test applied to the content of scientific hypotheses themselves. I think it is better to start from the idea that there is a distinctively scientific way of handling ideas and hypotheses.

Most ideas, especially big ones like evolution and divine creation, can, in principle, be handled both scientifically and unscientifically. The scientific way of handling a theoretical idea is to look for ways to expose it to observation. This does not mean that the idea has to be formulated so that a single observation could knock it out. Often, what it means is that scientists start with a very simple version of the idea, and look for ways to modify, develop, and extend it in response to what is observed. Crucially, when one version of the idea turns out to be inconsistent with what we seem to be seeing, and a modification is needed, the next move is to a version of the idea that can be "exposed" to observation in the same sort of way. With an idea as big as biological evolution, this tends to lead to the development of a whole range of specialized research programs, each looking at the role of evolution in some specific context. Some people look at evolutionary processes in model organisms (like bacteria and fruit flies) in the lab, others look at the patterns in the fossil record, and so on.

At each stage in the process, there will be unanswered questions and puzzles. At each stage there are "gaps," as the anti-evolutionists like to say. Of course there are gaps! The whole point of the process is to push the idea into new areas, and get it to make contact with more and more phenomena of the kind we can observe. If the theoretical idea is no good, this process will grind to a halt before long; it will be found impossible to develop it and hang onto it without continually insulating it from observation, as opposed to exposing it.

So for me, it is important to look not just at single hypotheses, but at the development and modification of ideas over time. Really big ideas like biological evolution, that atomic theory of matter, the Marxist theory of history, the Freudian struggle in the unconscious, and an intelligent designer of the universe all have the potential to be handled scientifically. Some of them are, and some of them aren't. The most important objection to the Intelligent Design movement is not that the very idea of intelligent design is linked to supernatural causes in a way that makes it intrinsically unscientific. The problem is that the idea has in fact been handled in a way that gets less and less scientific as time passes.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science at Harvard and Australian National University. He'll be our guest on Tuesday's upcoming show, "What is Science?"

Self-Deception and the Problem with Religious Belief Formation

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

A quote: “He who eats the bread and drinks the cup with an unbelieving heart eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” This line is from the communion liturgy of the Church I grew up in—the Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The word “judgment” in the quote is a way of saying damnation to Hell. The word “unbelieving” refers to disbelief in the core metaphysical doctrines of the Church. The effect of regular repetition of lines like this in the service is to strike fear in the person who may be questioning such doctrines. Fear in turn squelches inquiry and creative thought. I was only eight years old when I first heard that line and understood what it meant.

The point of this blog is not to criticize religious beliefs. I think many are wrong, many right, and many we just can’t know about. My focus is rather on the character of the belief formation process inherent in much religious practice. The phrase “belief formation process” will refer broadly to the way that beliefs in a human mind come about, are maintained, or are extinguished (or not). We all have beliefs, which have to get there somehow.

I choose this focus because I suspect my experience with the Grand Rapids CRC is representative of what goes on in a much broader spectrum of religions. This topic is also timely for Philosophy Talk, since we’re approximately halfway between our show on the existence of God and our upcoming show on the intelligent design argument. I also think that although particular religious beliefs have been much discussed and criticized, there still needs to be clearer discussion and criticism of the mental pathways by which such beliefs characteristically arise and are maintained. My view is that the a-rational nature of the religious belief formation process is pernicious and ultimately more destructive than any individual religious belief, or system of beliefs, taken by itself. That process critically involves self-deception.

There is, to start, a beautiful thing about being human. We’re equipped with senses, capacities for reasoning and logical comparison, and an imaginative faculty for generating new ideas. The beautiful thing is that just by our getting up in the morning and walking around the capacities we have compel us to the generation of new knowledge and more subtle beliefs. The data that come to our senses because of our daily actions spark our reasoning capacities to call out for explanation; our imagination answers with the generation of ideas that, if all goes well, provide answers. This is how detailed knowledge of nature—individual plants and animals, and systems of them—has come about in so many diverse human societies. The particular answers and beliefs will come and go—if one belief doesn’t work, another takes its place—but the beautiful thing is the process and the nature we have that allows us to participate in it. Let’s call this the healthy belief formation process; it’s driven by curiosity.

The process of religious belief formation stands in stark contrast. Let’s return to the quote I started with. There’s no doubt that the repetition of such threatening lines has played a role in the formation of many religious beliefs. But how? Those lines provide no evidence of their claims. Why should they bring about belief?

The first thing to note is the vilification of unbelievers. Those with an unbelieving heart will be judged, for, presumably, they’ve done something (morally?) wrong. The vilification of unbelievers threatens exclusion from the group to anyone on the fence. And then there’s the fear of Hell that’s engendered. The net effect of the vilification and fear is that a desire to believe comes about in the mind. “ . . . eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” I certainly had such a desire in my youth.

Once there is a desire to believe the metaphysical doctrines of the religion, the mind is ripe for self-deception. Self-deception has essentially two components. First, a person forms a belief in violation of his usual standards of evidence and judgment—what philosophers call epistemic norms. Second, a desire with content related to the content of the belief causes the deviation from the healthy belief formation process. Because vilification, fear, and desire bring about the religious credence—while that credence is at odds with usual standards of judgment—the process by which religious beliefs come about is one of self-deception. (For a similar view, see this piece by Georges Rey.)

A religious advocate might respond that I’ve gotten it all wrong, that it’s direct encounter with the spirit of God that brings about religious belief. But then why is religious practice so full of methods that have the precise effect of establishing credence by a-rational means? The singing, the chanting, the repetition of lines that vilify unbelief, the stress on believing only on faith? Surely the existence of such methods is no coincidence. And even if some have been touched by something divine, surely there are many who formed their religious beliefs in response to the constant pressures of liturgy. And that’s the religious belief formation process I’m talking about.

What exactly is wrong with this process? First, it’s at odds with the healthy belief formation process. It stagnates and undermines the healthy process just when it could be most beneficial to reflecting on our core beliefs and values. Fear, not curiosity, is the driving force. By representing as evil disbelief in any of a long and specific list of doctrines, the factors involved in the religious belief formation process cause us to disengage with the normal and healthy creative process of belief generation and revision. Persons attending a religious ceremony are made to fear the prospect that something else might strike them as true. The mind loses its flexibility. Consider some examples. How else could the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe persist for so long in the face of Galileo’s new evidence? How else could members of a church that canonized a woman, Joan of Arc, for her leadership hold the belief that women are categorically unfit to lead congregations? Why do evangelicals who have seen pictures of the changed color of the peppered moth believe natural selection has never occurred? How else should we explain the belief at high levels in the Catholic Church that it’s wrong to teach about and distribute sexual protection in a South Africa crippled by AIDS? Responsiveness to reality is needed here. But that’s precisely what the religious belief formation process lacks. The beautiful thing about the human mind is undermined.

Why else do I think the religious belief formation process itself is worse than any particular belief? As I’ve been stressing, I think the healthy belief formation process is central to our humanity; it’s a tragedy for that to be undermined. But as importantly, human actions take on a vicious and inflexible character when they are driven by beliefs that are unresponsive to reality. The problem with Crusaders and Jihadists is not primarily that they think their enemies are evil; it’s that their beliefs are unresponsive to being moved by the simple humanity of their victims. One belief can explain a skirmish, but it takes a degenerate, self-deceptive belief formation process to explain the systematic maintenance of a set of beliefs underlying a Crusade. Other examples are abundant: the Inquisition, the longtime inability of the Catholic Church to respond appropriately to child molestation by its clergy (how could we fire someone ordained by God?), and the malicious condemnations of Jerry Falwell (and those who listen to and act on them), to name a few. All these cases involve false beliefs that would have been changed by a simple bit of responsiveness to reality if they hadn’t been insulated by the religious belief formation process. Dogmatically held beliefs give rise to destructive behaviors. The further danger is that acceptance of such a degenerate belief formation process can spread and lead to wider corruption of our cognitive economy.

So what of the intelligent design argument, the argument that posits an intelligent creator to explain the ordered complexity of life in the natural world? It’s fine; these criticisms don’t touch it. I don’t think it ultimately works; nor does it fall in the domain of science. But I wish all religious thinking had such a rational character. The reasoning involved in that argument is an instance of the healthy belief formation process in action. We’d all be better off if religious people thought so rationally all the time.

What, finally, of faith? I know of two ways in which the word “faith” is used—one pernicious, one laudable. At its worst, “faith” is used rhetorically to bring about a-rational, unreflective credence in what the “wise” men of the Church would have you believe. I think I’ve said enough already to indicate what I think is wrong with this kind of “faith.” But the word is also used in another sense. Faith in this sense is the action-guiding confidence that good will come about if we pursue goodness uncompromisingly. Having this kind of faith is consistent with uncertainty about what the good, in terms of outcome, will ultimately be. And, despite what religious leaders may suggest, having this faith is also consistent with active questioning of religious dogma. In short, faith in this sense is not opposed to intellectual curiosity.

Why Believe (or Disbelieve) in God?

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show is about the existence, or non-existence, of God.     Our guest will be Walter Sinnot-Armstrong.  This is Walter's second appearance on Philosophy Talk.  He did a great job on our episode about moral dilemmas.   And we're pleased to have him back.

I gather, from our research team's pre-interview with Walter, that he  is a die-hard atheist.   He thinks that there is ample reason to doubt God's existence and no good reason to affirm god's existence -- at least if one means the all powerful, all loving, all knowing god, existing outside of space and time.   Since it's a season of religious, and quasi-religious holidays,  we thought it might be fun to actually reflect on the rationality, or lack thereof, of the religious beliefs that lie behind the celebration of such holidays. 

I'm going to post a long thread about today's topic after the show  It's a topic I've thought a great deal about for a long time.  I grew up in an intensely religous family and  in my youth,  I myself was a pretty intense and sincere believer.  When I was in my midteens,   though, something happened and I began to have serious  doubts.  I went on to Notre Dame where I met lots of very reflective and caring Catholics, whose religious belief played a major role in what sometimes seemed to me incredibly exemplary lives of service and compassion.  With my then girlfriend,  I would often go to high Mass.  That was a moving experience.    For a brief period,  I even contemplated converting to Catholicism.   That now seems like a distant past and another self to me.

But enough about me.  I opened this thread to find out what some of you think.   I invite you to weigh in with your own reaons for belief  or disbeilef.    If your  comments are succint and well argued,  we may have a chance to get to them on the air today.

So have at it, folks!  But be warned,  we will delete comments that violate the spirit of reasoned and cooperative inquiry and will also ban those who violate from posting any further.

On the Absence of Dogmatism

posted by Ken

During our episode on Religion and the Secular State  Robert Audi claimed that some religions are non-dogmatic  He might be right about that,  I am not sure which ones he had in mind.   On the other hand,  John was pushing the line that many of our "secular" beliefs have pretty much the status and function of dogmatic religious beliefs. At least for some people, he might be right about that. I recall that   at  least one caller agreed with John's remark.  I still insist that if we are to have a shared public life that reflects what  John Rawls calls "reasonable pluralism"  citizens must pursue public debate with an absence of dogmatism.    

Within reasonable pluralism we can follow Rawls and include   "all the reasonable opposing religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines likely to persist over generations and to gain a sizable body of adherents in a more or less just constitutional regime."    Rawls thought that there could be a  convergence among the adherents of  all such  reasonable,  but opposiing "comprehensive"  moral doctrines,  He thought that the adherents of such opposing views could nonetheless agree on  certain basic pricinciples of justifice.  principles, he claimed, that are enshrined  in the fundamental ideas of a democratic society and  that all reasonable citizens may  share, despite their differences in fundamental moral outlook.   This is what he called the overlapping consensus.

I share Rawls's optimism that it is possible for plural and conflicting comprehensive moral views to converge on something like an  overlapping consensus.   But I think a condition for the possibility of such convergence is an absence of dogmatism.  And I think achieving an absence of dogmatism is very hard.   About that I am in fact deeply pessimistic.   Indeed,  I think that given persistent and thoroughgoing dogmatism,  divergence and fragmentation may be more likely than convergence.

What do I mean by an absence of dogmatism?  And why do I thinks its a condition of the very possibility of achieving anything like an overlapping consensus.   It goes back to what I called in a previous post  totalizing nature of various moral outlooks.  By that I mean not just that they provide comprehensive moral assessments of a wide variety of things, but also that they generate felt entitlements to hold others to the strictures of the relevant moral outlook, whether or not those others endorse the relevant moral outlook.   This last part is the key. 

Suppose that I have a moral outlook that condemns slavery as wrong.  And suppose that you have a moral outlook that permits you to own slaves.  What am I to do when faced with your slave holding practices, practices that I abhor.   There are at least three options.   I could try to persuade you out of them.  I could try to force you out of them.  Or I could simply tolerate our differences.   Which options am I entitled to take?   One can imagine my endorsing a moral doctrine that entails an absolute prohibition on slavery -- not just for myself or adherents to that doctrine, but for everybody.   And one can imagine that doctrine generating in me a felt entitlement to hold the world to that doctrine, even those who do not accept that doctrine.   If I accepted such a doctrine,   I might feel entitled not just to try to persuade or to tolerate your slaveholding, but to force you out of your slaveholding.  Now suppose your slave-holding morality generated in you a felt entitlement to hold the world to a norm of permitting slave-holding.   You might feel thereby entitled to resist my attempts to change your practices with force or coercion of your own.

One quick caveat.  You might think that anybody who endorses a slave-holding doctrine is in some sense unreasoable, so not part of a Rawlsian reasoable pluralism.   There is something to be said for that approach.  But I think it's very tricky to make it work in the end.  Whatever else slaveholders have been throughout history,  I doubt much of a case can be made that they were any more or less deficient in rationality than the rest of us.   

I think that the committed slave-holder and the committed abolitionist might never reach moral consensus.  Nor do I think their failure to do so would require a failure of rationality on either of their parts.  Rational consensus and rational emnity are, I think, equally open to rational beings as real possibilities.   Because of that fact, moral struggle among even highly rational beings seems to me  as likely to end in discord, fragmentation, and/or the domination of one party by the other as in an overlapping consensus of the Rawlsian variety.  This is what makes the achievment of overlapping consensus deeply subject to historical and cultural contingencies, on my view.

There is a way  out,  I think, but it requires what I call an absence of dogmatism.  By that I mean that within certain limits,  we should not view ourselves as entitled to hold another to a moral principle that she would not herself endorse  (upon certain ideal conditions that I won't bother with here).  It should be clear that the absence of dogmatism is not rationally mandatory and not a directive of reason itself.  That's why I flag it as a separate and additional principle. I also think that there are lots of exceptions to it.  Moreover, the principle as I just stated it is much too crude and  needs lots of refinements.  But never mind about those just now.

The significance of the principle is that in accepting it, I represent to myself that I am not entitled  to hold another even to my deepest moral commitments unless that other in effect herself entitles me to do so.   By accepting some such constraint on my relations with others,  I view even my deepest moral commitments as commitments, in the first instance, for me alone.   That is not to say that they must remain commitments for me alone and that I can't propose them as commitments for us all.   But if I am to achieve moral community with those with whom I start out in deep disagreement,  I have to be open to revising my moral commitments in such a way that we together can reach a set of mutually binding agreements about the conduct of our shared lives.    I have to allow others as much say in the constitution of that order as I demand for myself.   And of course, the other has to do the same for me.

All this was meant as a response to John and a bit to Robert.   John says that many secular beliefs have the character of dogmatic religious beliefs.  But if that is so,  then I agree that secularism is not better than dogmatic religion as a basis for a shared life among plural and conflicted moral views.   If  Robert is right that some religions are non-dogmatic and if he meant by that that  they are held as provisionally binding, subject to moral debate, answerable to the canons of collective rationality, well then such religions can have a place in our attempt to constitute a life together.

Random Thoughts on Religion and the State

by John Perry

Today’s show is on Religion and the Secular State.  In our beloved more or less secular nation our thinking is anchored by the first part of the first amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The 14th amendment extends this to the states, many of which had established religions at the time of the constitution, as I remember  --- I wasn’t there, but as I seem to remember from my American History classes.

What were the founding fathers worried about?  The sort of Protestant versus Catholic or Anglican versus Puritan battles that made Europe such an unpleasant place?  Or the rights Jews and Muslims and Buddhists?  Or the rights of atheists and freethinkers?

Here are some random thoughts of mine on issues that have arisen in my living memory.  The acute reader will note that they are not defended with philosophical arguments, and may be quite inconsistent. They are intended as grist for the philosophical mill, not as finished philosophical reflections.  An hour with Ken Taylor and Robert Audi will leave me with a much more sophisticated understanding of all of this.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

A big issue facing our nation is whether the Ten Commandments can be exhibited at court houses and in other public places.  Well of course they can be, since they already are, most prominently, I understand, in the quarters of the U.S. Supreme Court.  But is it constitutional?  Is it right?

It seems to me that there is a pretty good argument that allowing the Ten Commandments to be displayed does not violate the amendment. They do play an important role historically in the development of the idea of the government by law rather than the whims of individuals. Most of the commandments aren't all that controversial.  It's rather nice to think of Justice Thomas looking out at the one about not covetting they neighbor's wife as he ponders deep issues.  Of course, he tends to be a strict constructionist, and its dubious that any of the women on the porno flicks he liked to watch were wives of neighbors.  So maybe it doesn’t bother him.

That commandment, for one, suggests that the placement of the ten commandments in a court house doesn't constitute a serious proposal that these commandments are a guide to the central priorities of American jurisprudence, much less behavior in the suburbs.

Why, one might ask, should the Ten Commandments be enshrined and not the Code of Hamurabi, which is also historically relevant to the very tradition that led to the conception f the rule of law as it developed in the West and eventually found its way into America's political system?  Well, one reason is that the Code of Hamurabi has 282 Laws, so that it would be quite expensive, and use up a lot of space, to carve it into the walls of courthouses.  About half of them end with “shall be put to death.”  As a liberal response to the Ten Commandments, this probably isn’t a winner. If you want to read the Code of Hamurabi, you’ll find it at:
http://www.unesco.org/delegates/iraq/hamurabi.htm

Actually, however, I think it would be a good idea to carve all of the prohibitions and commandments from what Christians refer to as "The Old Testament" into the walls of our courthouses.  The reason for this is that some of our politicians and religious leaders like to quote rather selectively from these commandments and prohibitions.  For example, almost everyone knows that that in the Old Testament it says that men are not supposed to sleep with men in the way they sleep with women, and if they do they should be put to death.  But it also says, I think in the same book, Deuteronomy or Leviticus or one of those books I read to put myself to sleep at night,  that if a woman grabs the private parts of a man who is fighting with her husband, in order to break up the fight, she shall have her forearm cut off.  All the passages in which God goes on endlessly about the exact size of shape of and lining for the box that is to hold his commandments would also be usefully carved into the walls.  This would lead, one would hope, people to laugh at attempts to base social policy for America in the twenty-first century on the rantings of the God of the Old Testament. However, given our Congress, maybe it would lead to a lot of one armed-women.

One of the idiots that television interviewed about this said that the Ten Commandments would have to be translated one way or another, and that Christians translate them differently than Jews, and different denominations of Christians translate them differently, so the very translation would violate the separation of church and state.  Give me a break.

THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

I feel much differently about the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, by the way.  That piece of hypocrisy was mounted in my living memory, during the Eisenhower years, as a way of showing that difference between Godless Communism and our American Way of Life.  It was not only hypocritical but incoherent, since if there is a God, presumably all nations are under God, the Godless as well as the religious.  We learned to add those words to the Pledge of Allegiance right at the same time we were learning to “duck and cover” in case of a Soviet attack on Lincoln, Nebraska.  Maybe the U.S. is too far under God for him to stop Soviet Bombers. 

The Pledge of Allegiance itself is not something of great historical significance; it's just a marketing gimmick of a flag manufacturer that caught on.  I am totally sympathetic with the fellow who took it to the Supreme Court, who has been pretty much pilloried in the press as a silly ass.  The verdict of the New York Times was that the pledge of allegiance issue was silly and the court should ignore it, but I thought their reasoning was silly.  No one should be required to add the words "under God" to their solemn recitation of a marketing gimmick.  I explained my thinking in a letter to the Times, which they didn’t print.

PEYOTE

Another issue that has come up over the years is whether religions that have traditionally done something that is against the law should be exempted from the law.  One case was an Native American tribe that used peyote.

Now this principle would obviously have its limits.  If a tribe of Native Europeans could show that it was part of their religion to rob people, or to murder them, or if Anglicans claimed that driving on the left was actually a British religious practice, we wouldn’t allow that on the grounds of the First Amendment and religious liberty.  Where do we draw the line?  When I ask this to those who think the religious peyote user should be exempted from the law, they say that the line should be drawn at those practices which are actually harmful. Harmless things that are illegal, or things that at most harm those who indulge in them, should be exempted.  But then, why should such things be illegal in the first place?

POLYGAMY

One of the myths of the religious history of the United States is that there was a big battle on religious grounds that led to the Mormons having to change their practices about polygamy in order for Utah to become a state.  I gather that is not so.  The legal battle was not fought on first amendment grounds; the religious clause of the first amendment didn’t become a much-used pillar of liberal jurisprudence until later.  The reasons the Mormons were forced to eat humble pie on this issue was that the Hayes administration, in line with the compromise that gave them the disputed Hayes-Tilden election, was ending reconstruction in the South.  In order to assuage the Northern voters, for letting up pressure on the reviled South, they had to put pressure on the second most reviled group in America, the Mormons.  The Mormons defended themselves on the grounds of States Rights; i.e., there was nothing in the constitution giving Congress the right to decide the rules of marriage.  Sound familiar?  If Massachusetts had been a territory then, and allowed Gay Marriage, it probably would have had to give it up.

Well, those are my deep thoughts about Religion and the State.  We'll dig deeper with Robert Audi soon.

John Perry

Respecting Religious Belief

posted by Ken Taylor

Tomorrow, we do a show on "Religion and the Secular State" with Robert Audi as our guest.  There will be lots of issues to talk about I am sure.  Arguments for and against the separation of church and state,  whether "religious reasons"  can function as "public reasons" in a secular state,  hot button issues like abortion, the pledge of allegiance.   We might not, though, get to what I regard as one of the most fundamental issues about religion, since it isn't really the focus of this episode.  I'm thinking both about the epistemology of religious belief and religion's "practical significance,"  to use a not quite  perfect phrase.  If, like David Hume,  you think that religious belief is mostly  superstitious or, like the philosopher, Georges Rey (warning .pdf), you think it's mostly based on wishful thinking and/or self-deception, then it seems to follow that religious belief deserves no more respect and acknowledgment than superstition --  especially not from the state, but also not from anyone who is committed to the  minimal canons of evidential rationality.  To be sure, there are very smart philosophers, like  Alvin Plantinga and William Alston,  who argue that religious beliefs are  espistemically respectable.  But I want to assume in this post, just for the sake of argument,  that they are not and see what, if anything follows, about whether we should acknowledge and respect religious belief in either the public or private spheres. 

So my question is this:  assuming  that religious beliefs are in some sense less than fully rational,  what follows for how they ought or ought not to be respected and acknowledge in private and public life?

You might think that the answer is straight-forward on this assumption.  But  even if we assume the thoroughgoing epistemic unreasonableness of religious belief, it still turns out to be complicated.

First of all,  believers don't experience  their own religious beliefs as mere superstitions or as the products of self-deception  (this is contra Georges Rey).    Religion is often experienced as  a source of deeply endorsed values and of fundamental life projects.   Shared religious beliefs and traditions bind people together into communities that  bridge gulfs of race, ethnicity, nationality.  Such communities  tie the generations together in networks of mutual support and reciprocal obligations.   That's what I mean by the "practical significance" of religious belief.   Once you have them,  a whole new normative and social order opens up.  Lots of good has been done both for and by  the inhabitants of such normative and social orders.

You could even try to  "justify" religious belief by appeal to the practical benefits of adopting such beliefs.  It would go something like this.  Once you believe, life takes on whole new meaning, you become enmeshed in life-affirming and sustaining traditions and practices -- depending, of course, of the details of the religion.   So, why not believe?  You could run this sort of argument even if you grant that the evidence is lacking because you could say that we often believe, and sincerely and non self-deceptively believe, even when there is no evidence.

But still, the question remains what am I as a non-believer and a friend of the canons of evidential rationality supposed to say to this line of thinking?   As long as there is no attempt to impose religious belief  on me, especially as long as religion is divorced from state power, then it's no skin off my back.  Let people have their  superstitions, let them define their life projects and find their deepest values in any way they want.  Just don't bother me.   That's not exactly respecting religious belief, but it's not exactly disrespecting it either.  Moreover, some aspects of  their life projects and fundamental values might be independently  "reasonable" even though adopted for religious reasons.   So they might contribute to an "overlapping consensus" about the basic shape of  our shared lives.  And that's all to the good.   You don't have to be religious to endorse the sanctity of human life, to yearn for peace, or to work for the amelioration of human misery everywhere.

The problem is that many believers will not be satisfied with such relatively benign  indifference to the fundamentals of religious belief.   That I think is because   religion functions for many as  a totalizing system of valuation -- and this is really how it differs from that which is experienced as mere superstition.    By that I mean that many believers experience through their traditions and theology a felt entitlement to hold the world to the strictures of their religion in one way or another.  The  means they adopt for doing so have historically ranged from the benign -- preaching, teaching, feeding -- to the truly destructive -- persecution, progroms, crusades, and so on.

Of course, the religiously  committed  would probably  say back to the religiously uncommitted that their positions are exactly equal.  We atheistic worshipers of the canons of secular rationality feel an entitlement to hold the world to our standards of belief.  The means we adopt to bring that about range from the benign to the truly destructive.   So what's really the difference?

That's an excellent question.   I won't try to address it fully here.  But I'd suggest that the big difference has to do with what I'll call responsiveness to rational pressure both from the "world" in terms of evidence for and against our beliefs and from other rational beings.   Religious belief in some way sits outside what I like to call the  contest of reason.  The religious believer experiences certain of her beliefs as beyond the reach of rational arguments and evidence, as unquestionable articles of faith.    That,  I think, makes them conversation stoppers.  Convictions that make the public conversation impossible to continue do not  belong in the public sphere in the first place.    Faith may or may not be a good thing for the faithful.    But when faith is not shared, and represents itself as beyond the reach of reason,  it makes public conversation difficult.

We have something of a paradox.   To the extent that religion generates in the believer the felt entitlement -- an entitlement not secured or ratiifed by reason --  to hold the world to their religion, religion demands a place in the public square.  But the more totalizing religion becomes and the more unwilling it is, in effect, to share the public square, to view itself as contestable, as one  set of beliefs and practices among others,  all of which must  earn their public places through public reason, argument, and evidence,  religion  is simply not made for the  public square.  Perhaps  believers do a disservice to themselves and to others when they insist that it is.