One of the things that I think Richard Dawkins has wrong is that he writes off all religions as equally irrational. I think it is worthwhile to ask why some religions spread and others don’t. Simply to write them all off as equally irrational misses an important point. It’s a mistake analogous to writing off all forms of non-reproductive sex as equally pointless.
The obvious way to approach this question is to ask why people choose one religious allegiance over another. Note that this is not the same as asking why they choose to believe one thing rather than an alternative. That seems to me a futile question until you know you are comparing like forms of “belief”. One of the huge strengths of religions language is that it enable meanings to be flipped right round while the sacred formulae which hold them remain unchanged. See the use made by Rowan Williams of Jesus’ classically exclusivist text “None comes to the Father but by me,” For centuries this has been understood to mean what it apparently says: that those who do not profess Jesus will go to hell. But the Williams interpretation simply flips it right round: that those who come to God must have known Jesus in some sense. Therefore we can’t tell anything in advance from it about who has come to God.
Belonging is necessary to make sense of belief. Only by belonging in a particular community of believers, who are more or less agreed on the interpretation of the sacred formulae, can your belief be given given particular content. Disagreements about theological belief only make sense within particular communities of believers. This is of course an aspect of a general truth about language. But it is also a particular truth about theology. The function of theological language is not to describe the world. It defines, and calls into existence, social facts.
In other words, we would like to believe that the purpose of religious language is to locate us in the universe. Its actual function is to locate us in the social world; and to say who is and who is not my brother. Since this is a very important question, the answers that people give when they choose or change religious allegiance are worth studying.
Does thinking like this get us anywhere? Does it increase understanding, or is it simply a parlour game? I’m not sure yet that I can prove it increases understanding. But it passes the first, and trivial test of worthwhile theory. It helps to predict the present. It excludes some things, or it ought to.
One nice consequence is that it supplies an explanation for the Calvinism of Scandinavia. Calvinism is a harsh religion in the sense that it makes great demands on its adherents, and requires them to think constantly of the state of their souls, which are in large measure a reflection of their standing in the community. So the Calvinist is required to think often and deeply about his commitment to the group. This is exactly the quality required to flourish in a harsh environment. The tight-knot peasant world of winter communities in Sweden is not very far from the Mormon Wyoming of Barlow’s youth. Anywhere in which your life may depend on your neighbour at any time will be hospitable to Calvinism. Sloppy, inclusive religions by contrast flourish where there is no great social cost to defection.
Modern America, in this, as in other things, is an exception because there is no longer a social cost to defection. It is so easy to reinvent yourself in the eyes of everyone except the credit card companies. None the less, the religion of Republican America continues to preach eternal damnation. You just have to read the small print to notice that it is always eternal damnation for other people: that’s what’s changed since Jonathan Edwards.
You’ve posted on the psychology of Calvinism… you brave, brave man. There are Those who hover in the outer darkness of this place, some with PhDs on exactly that. I shall say no more.
I disagree that there’s no social cost to defection in the US. That may be true in the godless cities of the coast, but in the good old Bible belt there is a considerable price to pay. Just look at some of the heartfelt anguish posted on the Pensacola Christian College bulletin boards, from people who feel they can’t leave the (extremely Puritan) environment because of what it would mean to their families. And churchgoing continues to be a standard part of life for entire classes of Americans (including the New York professionals) where their exact analogues over here would no more go to church on a Sunday than go caving in the nude. Something’s keeping the Yanks at the altar.
Families may be a factor in many ‘choices’ of religious affiliation, I’d guess. How many people have the same religion, albeit to a greater or lesser extent, as their parents?
(When I got the Father Dougals over Christianity, I went shopping for alternatives. None really worked for me, although I’m definitely a zennish sufiesque sort of wobbly mystic. That could be the Beefheart, of course…)
I disagree that there’s no social cost to defection in the US. That may be true in the godless cities of the coast, but in the good old Bible belt there is a considerable price to pay.
OK. Not no cost; but a much lower cost than is pretended. You can after all always go to the coasts, or to some other city. That is one reason I think why they hate the coasts so much.
Just look at some of the heartfelt anguish posted on the Pensacola Christian College bulletin boards, from people who feel they can’t leave the (extremely Puritan) environment because of what it would mean to their families
What are these bulletin boards whereof you speak?
PS I’m not afraid of the psychology of Calvinism. My Swedish family were Calvinists once.
I think there’s moe to it than that. Calvinism first flourished in cities where your physical existence certainly didn’t depend on your neighbours, and whilst, yes there is a lot of concern with one’s standing in the group (particularly amongst the other ‘Godly’) there are other important dimensions to it. For starters quite a bit of it is about me, me, me, my soul/my relation to God.
There is an immense amount of ‘thought crime’ to be found in 17th century spiritual diaries in which people worry not about what they do in the community but about their dirty inmost thoughts – particularly blasphemy, despair, the state of their prayer lives, the state of their soul etc. and a surprising amount of it is based in the mental world: not what you do, but the state of your ‘heart’ from which these wicked thoughts emanated was considered to be the really important thing.
There is also an inner world of mystical enjoyment and ecstasy in prayer which greatly insulated Calvinists against worldly misfortune. The ungodly authorities might sentence you to death or ruin your family but so long as you enjoyed ‘enlargement of heart’ or ‘liberty in prayer’ in your private devotions you knew that you were right with God, and that your heavenly experiences were a foretaste of the utter rapture to come when you died and went to heaven.
The other intersting thing is that these wonderful experiences were seen as being uncontrollable – the free gift of God through grace and hence not something you could create to order or deserve through works. So you have this situation of people depending on an uncontrollable unbiddable almighty force which brings ecstasy and reassurance as its gifts, but when it retreats leaves misery despair and a temptation to blaspheme or doubt your salvation. You can’t control it – you can only, by putting your metal house in order and by praying and repenting, make yourself a slightly more suitable habitation for it – but you don’t choose it – it chooses you. It chooses whether you will live or die for all eternity.
Now yes this is an incredibly powerful force for social cohesion because the gatekeepers to this world of the converted expect high standards – despite their condemnation of works as useless for salvation. Yes it does encourage a lot of inner scrutiny – I think a lot of modern counselling and psychotherapy would be unthinkable without this background. But it also encourages an inner sense of authority and reflection which can lead to people breaking away from the group and thinking for themselves. It’s no accident that this form of piety was the soil from which the Scottish Enlightenment sprung. Teach people to reflect deeply and privately on themselves and then discuss and further reflect upon the results and you never know what that will lead to.
IMO what we’re looking at in modern fundamentalism is often a form of Calvinism lite. It’s so damn easy to be saved and approved of by the godly group whilst having no more inner life than a clam. You just claim that Jesus is your personal saviour and sign up to all the cherished dogma of the group – you’re not expected to go through a deeply introspective and scouring conversion process in which you are challenged to prove that you have the spirit and where you really have to learn to critically examine yourself.
A final thought: I’ve often wondered if the reason Calvinism is so attractive to fishing communities or communities in extreme natural conditions is because its version of God is like the land, the sea and the elements they live in: unpredictable, unbiddable, cruel – often seemingly without rhyme or reason, yet the source of life – giving to whom it will and taking from whom it will. But that’s just my take on it.
Umph. Tes, your thesis about the Calvinism of Sweden fits with the Calvinism of Harris and Lewis and North Uist and Skye. But how about the Catholicism of South Uist and Morar? Or again Ireland, where Catholicism took on a distinctly Puritan tinge in the 19th century thanks to a combination of the French Jansenist tradition and the effects of the Famine.
Again, it would fit with the Netherlands, where it has always struck me that the nature of Dutch society depends on the fact that, with the constant threat of flooding, you just have to get on with your neighbour, come what may: you will be very outspoken (the Dutch make the traditionally blunt Yorkshireman appear positively mealy-mouthed) but you have to work together otherwise the sea will flood in – whereas in America if you get fed up with your neighbour you just up sticks and move further West. I think it is no coincidence that the Dutch word for society is samenleving – literally, living together.
Anyway, keep up the flow of stimulating comments which are capable of prodding even my superannuated brain into some semblance of activity. Robert
How is Dawkins wrong? In your argument against him, your analogy in The Independent of a few years back – 100 men having 100 different concepts of what constitutes their one true love
ah, Mr Hewitt…
As far as I know, the ‘eternity in heaven with God’ is pretty much the preserve of Christianity and Islam (which may well be at least partially a synthesis of early Christianity and Judaism, if I remember correctly). Islam goes on about ginger-flavoured fountains and raisins – which may be the sort of thing to keep you on the straight and narrow, but ever since I discovered bottles of Idris and Californian fruit products at my local corner shop, the way of submission has rather lost its charm for me.
Judaism seems to regard souls and afterlives as relatively unimportant (you can believe or not as you wish). I’m not sure where the ideas came from – they were certainly around at the time of Jesus, as m’learned friend tells me that they were some of the points on which the Pharisees and Sadducees differed. Plato banged on about souls a lot, but I’m not going in there for all the ginger beer in Allah’s SMEG.
Further out east you get to play with reincarnation, karma and a variety of other fun concepts that while certainly having a bearing on your earthly behaviour are rather impersonal mechanisms built into the universe – no god required. Although I do get a bit confused as to whether the universe is God in Hinduism and the other related beliefs.
As for animalistic and shamanistic ideas and stuff like Shinto, I know not. I suppose you’ve got Valhalla as a kind of depository for the heroic deceased of a Nordic disposition (for blokes. Girlies got to Hel, apparently, where nothing much happens), and the Greek mythologies have a fair amount of subterranean post-life shenanigans about which I know so much less than I should that I’ll shut up.
R
FWIW, Roz has also posted on big Rowan’s new interpretation of “none comes to the father but by me”, intriguingly approvingly.
aaaargh! I just had a huge comment post wiped out by some idiot in command of my mouse. I’ll have to move slowly through these points.
While it
Dawkins is a fundamentalist. Like all fundamentalists he is immune to rational arguments and more interesting as a case study or to wind up than to argue with.
Incidentally, if the extract in Thursday’s Grauniad (http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1294822,00.html) is anything to go by, his new book is not worth tuppence.
Immune to rational arguments? Which ones, exactly? While it’s true that he can often appear condescending, he merely seems to be demanding of his opponents: “Prove it to me using empirical evidence and I’ll believe it, too.”
MH
Michael, the fundamental objection to Dawkins is that the factual claims which religious affirmations seem to make are not the important things about them. They can be taken literally; they can just as validly be taken as meaning something quite different.
Now, I think, the Selfish gene is an extremely valuable book; but it makes good biological sense only once you understand that “Selfish” doesn’t mean selfish, “Gene” doesn’t mean gene, and the definite article is a bit dodgy too.
So I am primed to believe that you need to understand even religious affirmations in context. It’s not enough to prove that the religious are talking nonsense. You have to show that they mean it, too; and that is more difficult.
Louise: I tremble in fear of damnation as much as anyone. And you are quite right about the inwardness of Calvinism. I just think this inwardness has to be in some sense a reflection of outward circumstances if it is to remain credible. What we need, and I am too stupid to provide, is some kind of model showing the persistence of counter-factuality. I have in mind a sort of graph, with improbability/counterfactuality up one axis, and time up the other. It starts at the top — you can fool all of the people some of the time — and then heads in some shape off to the far end, to conclude that any belief which lasts, say 500 years, is likely to be well-founded at least in the light of the available evidence.
But which shape? What makes it look pear-shaped, or like the zooming half of a suspension bridge?
Rupert: families are a huge factor in religious affiliation. But this is interesting precisely becasue they are a bad predictor of the propositional content of this affiliation. Both my uncle and his son my cousin would describe themselves as evangelical Christians. Others would supply the missing denominator “head-banging”. Yet their generatioal shift has been huge.
I’m not sure I’m catching your drift, Andrew. Is what you are looking at why religions are ‘adaptive’ despite being counter-factual in so many ways? I would say that Calvinism does a really good job of describing and shaping a certain sort of inner landscape which is very adaptive in extreme circumstances, but as well as making for tight knit groups, it also makes for individuals who are able to go against the grain because they have an inner source of certainty and consolation. Where I think it really scores is not in its description of the external but in its description of internal processes – which has some very intersting parallels to modern counselling.
I think we’re probably saying similar things but due to the constraints of e-mail we’re probably talking past each other a bit!
In saying that Dawkins is wrong to write off all religions as equally irrational, and that it is worthwhile to ask why some religions spread and others don
In saying that Dawkins is wrong to write off all religions as equally irrational, and that it is worthwhile to ask why some religions spread and others don
Richard, you’re simply repeating Dawkins’ mistakes. The first is so suppose that religions are about “belief”, and that a belief is a propositional statement.
The second is to assume that we should — or even can — choose everything important on the basis of rational deliberation. Hardly anything could be more important than the language I speak. I inherited it from my parents. That is a perfectly reasonable way for humans to behave.
“Rational choice” is only useful in a very small proportion of the choices in the world, and we may have perfectly good reasons for our actions which we can’t articulate. In fact, a Darwinian, looking at a world full of purpose and design, but containing only one species with language, must conclude that almost all the behaviour in the world has a good reason, and that a vanishingly small fraction is the result of rational choice exercised by rational choosers.
The statement that religious faith is distinguished be belief in the absence of evidence is a rather elegant disproof of itself. Religious people are constantly gaining confirming evidence for their beliefs about the world, just as Dawkinsian atheists are for their beliefs about religion. In both cases, the fault is a refusal to look for disconfirming evidence.
Suppose, then, that my belief system, courtesy of my parents and grandparents, states that the world is a flat circle of land masses and encompassing seas, balanced, precariously (hence earthquakes) on the back of a giant tortoise, and that the sun and stars are merely tiny holes in a vast colander suspended above. Is that as valid and, therefore, immune from rational examination as, say, the conviction that the universe, earth, all thereon were created in a six day timeframe by an omniscient super-being with an aversion to pork and anal sex? If not, what are your criteria for yelling “Bullshit!”?
MH
I think the rationality of any particular belief depends on the information available to the believer. For us, now, to believe either of your theories would be irrational. We know better, or we can easily be taught better. So what?
If you’re making a general argument that we should not accept facts without considering the evidence, I would agree with you, and so would the Pope. The fact that he comes to different conclusions from us is the distressing foundation of liberalism. If you’re arguing that we should never accept things on authority, my answer is that often we have no choice.
In the matter of religiously inspired cosmologies, we obviously do have a choice. I think we should exercise it.
But I can think of exceptions to the rule that we should we should always strive for the truth. It’s an aspiration, not a rule of conduct. I am constantly being asked factual questions to which I don’t know the answer, usually when my daughter’s homework is due. I don’t feel under any moral obligation to find the answers.
I’m sure that our criteria for saying that something is factualy true are very similar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much point in this. But I don’t think that “false” and “Bullshit” are synonymous.
“So what?” So what if one of the acolytes of the giant tortoise suddenly decides that, in order to placate the thing and thereby minimise earthquake distruption, he feels that he has to sacrifice your daughter to it? Do “false” and “bullshit” then become slightly more synonymous? Your stance, as I understand it, is that all religions are basically a “create your own pizza” and that my extra-hot with double cheese is, ultimately, just as valid as Rupert’s prawn and pineapple. But isn’t Dawkins essentially saying that there is, in fact, no pizza, therefore what you choose to put on it is irrelevant and futile?
MH
A general preference against the sacrifice of daughters is all you need; and much easier to enforce than a demand that everyone in the world believe only the truth.
And I really don’t believe that these things are “just as valid as each other” in any interesting sense. Otherwise I wouldn’t be spending so much time and effort trying to distinguish between them.
Very well, then. Let
Statement A: “According to all the evidence that is currently available, should I wish to look at it, there
Statement A: “According to all the evidence that is currently available, should I wish to look at it, there
Statement A:
el Patron, you say that my second mistake is to assume that we should — or even can — choose everything important on the basis of rational deliberation. I am at a total loss as to how you could conclude this from reading my comment. Yes, for the record, I do think we should make rational (to us at least) choices whenever we can (and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot), but there are clearly many instances where we can’t. In fact, my original comment accused you of making the very assumption that you accuse me of making: that religious belief should be a rational choice.
As to my first supposed Dawkinsian mistake (I don’t consider myself a disciple of Dawkins, by the way), religious people might think they are ‘constantly gaining confirming evidence for their beliefs about the world’, but none of them has ever been able to convince me that their evidence passes muster. This is because they and I have totally different (and incompatible) standards as to what constitutes valid ‘evidence’. Gould pretty much hit the nail on the head with his idea of non-overlapping magisteria – although I think he was simply rehashing Popper’s concept of incompatible paradigms.
And as for looking for disconfirming evidence for my atheist beliefs… Where do you suggest I start? How can I possibly devise a test to disprove my belief that there is no god? And which particular god should it be that I look for?
Richard, sorry if I misunderstood you. It’s a button of mine: the argument that there is no rational reason for religious belief, ergo there is no good one.
As for the problem of confirming evidence: this is the root of an enormous amount of difficulty. I’ve had a number of experiences myself which could be taken by those so disposed, as proof or at any rate confimration that there is a benevolent providence looking after me. I don’t take them that way myself; but I quite see that if I were looking for evidence, I would have found it. The same is true for all the Christians I know. It is simply not true, as atheists maintain, that they are believing in the teeth of the evidence. The ones who are concerned about their relationship with God are constantly finding things out about it. I think they’re deluded, but I can’t prove this, and I wouldn’t want to. I have always found that the way to argue with a religoous person who is being told by god to do somethign stupid is not to claim that god doesn’t exist, but to think of better lines for her. Doesn’t always work, of course. But better than the alternatives.
“Ergo, Statement B:
“Ergo, Statement B:
PS Apologies for the double posts: the first one encoutered a server error.
What Calvinist Scandinavians? Nearly all Scandinavian Christians are Lutherans, and we have several dozens of other small denominations that are less still far more popular than Calvinism.
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