Feb
17
On Growing Up Intellectually
February 17, 2007 | 7 Comments
Something that Mike Liccione posted recently at Sacramentum Vitae caught my attention and has been percolating in my mind ever since. In discussing the recent debate between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris over the existence of God and the usefulness of religion (is anyone else reminded of the Monty Python routine where the existence of God is to be determined by a wrestling match between an atheist philosophy professor and an Anglican bishop? God exists, by the way, by two falls to a submission), Mike ruminates on his own intellectual history:
I myself haven’t bothered overmuch with the Harrises and the Dawkinses because their arguments are no better, no more original, and no more numerous than those which I had heard in various bars and dorm rooms by the time I was a sophomore at Columbia.
I think the operative word here is “sophomore.” In case you’ve never been a student of etymology (when I was a classicist I used to have to teach a service course on etymology and word-formation–that alone was a sufficient motivation for me to abandon the discipline and become a philosopher), the word “sophomore” is a combination of two Greek roots, “sophos”, meaning “wise”, and “moros”, meaning “fool”. A “sophomore” is a “wise fool” in the sense that he has just enough education to be able to join in some rather sophisticated discussions, but not enough to be able to contribute anything worthwhile to them. And, if you’ve ever taught college sophomores, you probably know as well as anybody that there’s nothing quite so tiresome as a person who thinks he knows more about something than he really does. (Actually, if you’ve never taught college sophomores and experienced discourse with an arrogant jerk who thinks he knows everything, you can simulate the experience just by reading my blog.) When I think of the many scholarly books written over the years by thoughtful, intelligent people in defense of theism, I am rather startled at the paucity of the atheist response to that literature. It is rather easy to find complex and sophisticated defenses of the theistic position (I think a good place to start, actually, would be the trilogy written by Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, The Coherence of Theism, and The Evolution of the Soul, all published by Oxford University Press), but it seems that the recent books by Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are about as good as the atheist’s defense gets, and that speaks more eloquently than any argument from evil. (I realize that it is petty to point this out, but I’m not above being petty: many of the books in defense of theism, such as those by Richard Swinburne, are published by reputable, academic presses like Oxford University Press; one cannot help but note that the publishers for Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are Houghton Mifflin [official publisher of The Lord of the Rings!], Penguin [snort!], and Knopf [well, at least it looks nice], respectively.)
This is not merely a recent phenomenon, so we can’t blame it on the banalization of academia that seems to be endemic since the 60s. Bertrand Russell, writing nearly a century ago, argued in much the same way that today’s atheists do, unable to summon anything like a convincing argument, and in some cases resorting to patently bad ones (”Christianity can’t be true because so many Christians are such awful people”). Indeed, I would say that the last interesting argument against theism was not an argument against theism at all, but an argument against a certain kind of method: Hume’s argument, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, claiming that it is invalid to infer like causes from like effects. This takes care of the so-called argument from design, at least as it was known in Hume’s day, but it is hardly an effective argument against either the existence of God or the usefulness of religion more generally.
Nor do things get any better as one progresses further into the past. The Renaissance had no better arguments to offer, and in antiquity the arguments against theism were grounded in assumptions that no self-respecting atheist would accept today (arguments for theism weren’t much better, but that’s a different story). One begins to wonder whether atheism isn’t so much an intellectual position as a kind of adolescent posturing. Many adolescents reject religious belief; some of them, apparently, never grow up. When they do, perhaps they will write more rigorous and interesting arguments in defense of their atheism. Or perhaps they will awake from their dogmatic slumbers and see the light.
Comments
7 Comments so far
Scott, In reference to your “adolscent posturing of atheism”, if anyone s interested, here is a link to an article by Paul Vitz called the Psychology of Atheism: http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth12.html
Also, he wrote a book called The Faith of the Fatherless, tries to turn Freud’s analysis of religious belief on its head, he analyzes the relationship between famous atheists and their fathers which was often poor and shows the necessity of good parenting to help foster religious belief. It reminds me of one of JP II’s plays called the Radiation of Fatherhood, it may be hard to accept the idea of a loving God without a loving father.
In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas provides two objections to the existence of God: the existence of evil; and the sufficiency of nature and human reason to explain everything.
Nowadays, “human reason” and “nature” would be combined into “science,” but on the whole it’s the same story.
That’s very true. Indeed, the sufficiency condition appears to be an a priori assumption of the working scientist, although I have known a few for whom the wonder of the natural world, even in the face of the most reductionistic explanation, provides a motivation for belief.
What I find by turns amusing and disturbing is that the discourse about atheism and religion that get the most press almost always fails to acknowledge the complexity of all of the issues involved. For instance, most analytic philosophers are atheists or agnostics, and many of them take natural science very seriously as a reason to reconsider many if not most of the beliefs that we hold on non-scientific grounds. Yet virtually no serious philosopher would say the ridiculously over-simplified things that people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris say about science. In fact, as Scott has pointed out, there are at least as many philosophers working today who are anti-realists about science as there are realists. Even philosophers who are realists about science and aspire to a completely naturalistic metaphysics often refuse to claim that the methods of natural science are sufficient to explain everything in reality, or that we are compelled to interpret science in a reductive way. There are, of course, plenty of philosophers who take basically the same position that, say, Sam Harris does, but none of them would pretend that it’s nearly so simple as he makes it sound.
Possibly the worst thing about all of this is that the questions about the philosophical implications of natural science that fail to be addressed in popular presentations of atheism are crucial questions for anybody, and the positions that these atheists take tend to reject a whole lot more than the reality of the divine. There are dozens of reasons why any thoughtful atheist or agnostic should want to reject the attitude that these guys usually take towards science, and in fact many of them do. But for whatever reason, as soon as religion enters into the discussion, highly questionable views about science suddenly become acceptable.
I realize that I’m more or less preaching to the choir here, but I wonder why atheism needs people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to argue for it. It has nothing to do with the weakness of arguments for atheism, because there are some fairly good ones. It’s just that these guys aren’t making them.
In the end, I’m more disappointed that BeliefNet has somebody like Andrew Sullivan to argue in favor of religion. Why not get somebody who actually does philosophy? Except for that fact that Harris would fall flat on his face in an argument against Richard Swinburne, John Haldane, or anyone of the sort, the only reason seems to be that Sullivan is better known than any theistic philosopher. It’s too bad, really, because everybody could benefit from hearing a real debate about religion instead of the rhetorical displays that Harris and Sullivan have been offering.
As for Aquinas’ thoughts on arguments against the existence of God: in my own case, the alleged sufficiency of human reason to explain everything counts for very little. I run into far more trouble with the problem of evil, with psychological objections, and with what often seem highly implausible attempts to render everything in religion consistent with itself and with everything else that we have reason to believe. The argumentative strategies haven’t changed much since Aquinas’ time (with the possible exception of the psychological strategy), but the arguments in favor of the existence of God seem to have been weakened quite a bit since then. Perhaps I’m over-estimating the strength that Aquinas thought they had, but it seems plain to me that cosmological arguments, moral arguments, and even the best arguments from design are at best simply plausible and open to plenty of reasonable objections, and I doubt whether ontological arguments were ever worth very much. Then again, plausibility might be strengthened by faith — but then there’s people like me, for whom faith is always laced with self-suspicion.
Personally, I’ve never really understood why anybody thought that arguments were necessary to prove the existence of God anyway. Wittgenstein got at least one thing right, when he pointed out that religion is spoken in the language of the heart, not of the head.
He was definitely right about religion, and Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion do well to remind us that the kinds of philosophical arguments that I’ve mentioned are at best auxiliary to religion itself. That is, of course, why nobody has ever become a Christian simply by being persuaded by a cosmological argument. My own religious impulses are certainly not rooted in arguments, but in a response to the world, to human existence, and to certain elements of the Christian tradition. The trouble, though, is that nothing at all is proven by those impulses or by the fact that we can come to make sense of existence by adopting religious language. Even if we aren’t after ‘proof’ in a strong sense (and I doubt that we should be), there’s not even really anything about our religious impulses, experiences, and language that gives us anything more than a highly defeasible reason to believe in their truth. When placed next to the facts (and I take them to be facts) that a) human beings throughout history have participated in a whole lot of mutually incompatible religious language games and have had a whole lot of mutually incompatible religious experiences, and b) there are clearly a great number of cases in which religious belief must be mere psychological coping with various aspects of the human condition — then it becomes very easy, for me at any rate, to be extremely suspicious of the language of my heart, and of anyone’s heart for that matter. The difficulty increases to the extent that the content of belief takes on sharper definition, greater propositional content, and more secure claims to knowledge. At that point, reason seems to me to be the only arbiter. And it so far hasn’t pointed very much in the direction of affirming the language of the heart.
When I observe my son, and take note of some of the things he says and does, I have a tendency to attribute certain motives, impulses, etc. to him. I think that in general, when I do so, I am more often right than wrong about him.
When I observe someone else’s son or daughter, and take note of some of the things they say or do, I may have a similar impulse to attribute motives, impulses, etc. to them, but I suspect that in general, when I do so, I am more often wrong than right.
Just because Wittgenstein was right about religion doesn’t mean he was right about everything, including “language games”. It’s quite possible that there’s more in common among “incompatible religious language games” than the casual observer might suspect. Seeing the commonality in itself requires a kind of perspective and ability to see that not everyone shares. There’s certainly no reason to think that rationality as such has any capacity for affirming the language of the heart, even in principle (or perhaps especially in principle).
But then, being suspicious can be a virtue, on occasion.
I would be interested in hearing more about your view that “there are clearly a great number of cases in which religious belief must be mere psychological coping”.