The End Of Faith

March 19, 2005 1:21 PM

The End Of Faith

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.
posted by nofundy (156 comments total)

These are mere words—until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior. There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.
posted by nofundy at 1:23 PM on March 19, 2005

If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.

There are Oscar-winning screenplays in each combination and permutation of the above.
posted by AlexReynolds at 1:25 PM on March 19, 2005

consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: ... Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.

How would this be a change from my current experience?

Don't forget to enjoy a cold, refreshing PepsiBlue™ while reading Sam Harris' "important and timely book"!
posted by casu marzu at 1:30 PM on March 19, 2005

I'm not sure how much I agree with these ideas. I think humans are idealistic creatures, seeking the greatest good for themselves and sometimes others. The ideas of God and Paradise have not persisted simply because they are ingrained, but because (I think) they are as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago. Now, I haven't read this book, and I'm glad it purports to combat faith objectively - i.e. secular as well as religious faith - but I wonder if this guy shouldn't be taking his own advice. Believing oneself to be correct is a kind of faith, and doubtless he has faith in his own ideas as to the causes of humanity's woes.

The reason people kill each other over these things, indeed the only reason people ever kill each other, is because they deem their cause as having greater value than a human life, or a million human lives. Faith is certainly a cause for which countless have suffered and died, but is faith itself to blame? Would Harris eradicate the soul, the hope of billions, the salvation of mankind as some people believe? A world without God may be just as dangerous as one without - I personally have no preference, at least I don't think I do.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:34 PM on March 19, 2005

Um, I haven't read a detailed review of the book, but it looks like a recapitulation of the last 200 years of Western thought.

What sycophant of science hasn't at one time hypothosized that organized relgion, in whatever form, wasn't the root cause of all societal evils?

I tend to find the truth is much more complex. I concede that most of the postive externalities of relgion can be manifested through alternative means, but cultures don't seem to work this way, or at least nobody has figured out how make it work.

Can all knowledge be arrived at through "rational" thought? Or is there some sort of mystical component to consciousness, reality, LIFE that is truly inexplicable and existential? I lean toward the latter. Spirtuality, not religion. Or religion and spirituality. Or relgion but not spirituality. I think that asking these questions will get you on the right path.
posted by gagglezoomer at 1:37 PM on March 19, 2005

wasn't = was
posted by gagglezoomer at 1:41 PM on March 19, 2005

i'm not sure if this book is brilliant or just completely self-evident. i'd order it if my currency's exchange rate didn't suck so bad. :)

wait --

“... faith—blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned—threatens our very existence. His exposé of faith-based unreason—from the religious fanaticism of Islamic suicide bombers to the secular fanaticism of Noam Chomsky—is a clarion call for reasoned debate...”

nevermind, i'm sold.
posted by spiderwire at 1:42 PM on March 19, 2005

is there some sort of mystical component to consciousness, reality, LIFE that is truly inexplicable and existential?

No.
posted by Bort at 1:42 PM on March 19, 2005

Don't forget to enjoy a cold, refreshing PepsiBlue™ while reading Sam Harris' "important and timely book"!
posted by casu marzu at 4:30 PM EST

I never considered that angle when posting this . My apologies. I still consider the excerpts from the book worth the time it takes to read them. I hope some will read those and then post their reflections about the material. Thank you.
posted by nofundy at 1:43 PM on March 19, 2005

...sort of reminds me when my dad starts talking about how all the hippies wanted to do was return to the Garden of Eden but then got crushed because niceness is fundamentally antithetical to the desires of the CEOs running our country, then proceeds in the same breath to rail against "fundies" because they're too dogmatic and insular...

this may be appropriate, too:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the '60s. ... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody ... or at least some force — is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.

...on preview: oooh, excerpts! brb.
posted by spiderwire at 1:45 PM on March 19, 2005

...man, i just want to start posting excerpts here wholesale. for those of you who missed the bit about excerpts, the first ten pages are here:

http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/full-text/chapter_one/

initial thoughts:

1. the analogy about "believing" that you've won the lottery is weak. that's not the same type of belief.

2. Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand... hee, hee, hee....

3.Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. this is a good point if somewhat exaggerated. and it's not true that there is a political consensus on this point. many parts of the far left and right prove otherwise on a daily basis.

4. i don't see very much addressing the issue of "faiths" that profess that they're not faiths ... like the aforementioned Noam Chomsky...

5. not sure i agree with his "moderation is bad" argument so far. done with the excerpt now. reading again...
posted by spiderwire at 1:54 PM on March 19, 2005

I think what is nearly at hand is the end of large brains as an outcome of natural selection. We grew brains to help us deal with the challenges of survival, but they have grown to the point where they are no longer beneficial to us as a species. Nucular weapons and the outcome of religious dogmatism are two of the most noxious results. Up next, I believe, (<-- there's that bugbear!) will be the chitinous carapace as a means of genetic ascendency.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:54 PM on March 19, 2005

nah, more nonplussed this time. he makes a good point about religion about about religious moderation, i guess, but it's also a point you could make any number of ways. and sure, i agree, give no quarter to the fundies, of any stripe or creed.

but still, it raises the obvious question: and? i don't see much in this excerpt suggesting a plan for dealing with the fundies -- you'd think that if there was one, it would have cropped up some time between the Enlightenment and now.

maybe it's somewhere near the end of the book. guess i'll just have to savor the mystery.
posted by spiderwire at 2:04 PM on March 19, 2005

**about religion about about religious moderation

uhhhh... no idea what that was supposed to be. strike those first three words, i guess.

out.
posted by spiderwire at 2:04 PM on March 19, 2005

There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another.

Amen.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 2:08 PM on March 19, 2005

Apropros of a thread below this one, it's worth pointing out that Godel's incompleteness theorem demonstrated that no machine, no computer, will ever be able to exhaust the truths of mathematics. It follows immediately, as Godel himself pointed out, that if we are able to grasp these truths, then our minds must not be machines or computers.

So I'm not sure how one criticizes the "irrationality" of faith. We all operate on faith. Without faith, reason can't get started.

If Harris were trying to make a sociological point about the dangers of Islam, well, that'd be one thing. But he's not. He seems to be trying to make a philosophical point about "faith", in general, which is simply not warranted.

"If one identifies the correct foundation for theory as 'empirical verification', on what foundation has one identified this as the correct foundation? If it is on the basis of empirical verification, then the foundation merely assumes its own validity in a circular logic. But if it is based on some other foundation, then we may ask for the foundation of that foundation, and so on endlessly."

— Beyond Postmodernism? Toward A Philosophy Of Play


"What we see in postmodernism is that reason, unguided by faith, not merely fails to uphold everything, but destroys everything, even itself."

-- "At the End of Pragmatism"


"Even when supported by the senses, reason has short wings"

-- Dante, Paradiso, canto 2.
posted by gd779 at 2:11 PM on March 19, 2005

Amen.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 2:19 PM on March 19, 2005

I never considered that angle when posting this . My apologies.

OK, fair enough. I concede that didn't expect an answer to my snark, and especially not a thoughtful once. Since I got one, I'll make a good faith effort to respond in kind:

I still consider the excerpts from the book worth the time it takes to read them. I hope some will read those and then post their reflections about the material. Thank you.

Here are a couple, with which I suspect you'll disagree.

I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

This honestly sounds rather ominous, as if he's basically setting up an argument for anti-religious extremism as the logical solution to the (very real) problem of religious extremism. It's one thing to argue that we shouldn't tolerate dangerous religious beliefs; it's quite another to take that a step further and say that we shouldn't tolerate any religious beliefs, or to imply, as I think he does, that there's something inherently dangerous about all religious beliefs. This is just replacing one brand of fundamentalism with another.

These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.

As a scientist -- an irreligious one at that -- I've grown really tired of the phony science vs. religious dichotomy that so many people seem so fond of. This guy seems to be trotting out the same fallacy as so many others -- namely, that if we could just get everyone to consider things rationally for a few minutes, they would logically conclude that their religious beliefs contradict reason, and let go of them. Human beings have perfected the art of rationalizing entirely contradictory beliefs -- in fact, he basically argues that they've been doing this for thousands of years. So why does he suppose that his thin little tome is going to stamp that out?

I have to say I don't think I'm going to go out and buy this book. It just seems like a less-obviously insane version of this.
posted by casu marzu at 2:21 PM on March 19, 2005

We all operate on faith. Without faith, reason can't get started.

Indeed. 1 + 1 = 2 is a huge leap of faith, i.e the belief in discrete objects.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:27 PM on March 19, 2005

gd779 -- which truths of mathematics that are unprovable do we grasp? Why do you think they're unprovable, and why do you think we [all?] grasp them?


I've never bought that short, simple "proof" that we're not just machines.
posted by jepler at 2:28 PM on March 19, 2005

Oops, I guess I meant this. Dr. Joseph N. Hilton, Ph.D.™ seems to have updated his website recently.
posted by casu marzu at 2:29 PM on March 19, 2005

OK, the word belief is being used WAY to loosely for me to really appreciate this argument. I believe the sky is purple vs. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Same word, not even remotely similar thought-processes behind the two uses.

But, it is interesting stuff to think about. On the idea of religion being the root of man's evil: I say nonsense. The root of man's evil is his evil nature. OK, that's a tautology. But, being an atheist myself, it seems to me that religion as humans practice it is merely a reflection of humans. We kill each other in the name of religion, sure, but we were going to kill each other any way. We do bad things with religion because humans are often venal and selfish. That's about us, not our religions.

Unlike BlackLeotardFront, I tend to think that we are anything but altruistic at heart, on average.

But it is an important subject: do we make decisions based on reality, or our own imagination? What is reality? I obviously prefer reason -- many, many humans don't. But I am always skeptical of people that try and pretend it's all the same: science, religion, etc. it's all just faith. That is sophistry of the highest kind.
posted by teece at 2:31 PM on March 19, 2005

Indeed. 1 + 1 = 2 is a huge leap of faith

*consults fingers*

are you sure about that?
posted by jonmc at 2:31 PM on March 19, 2005

How he assumes the faith behind "Acid Culture" (that "there is light at the end of the tunnel") I would like to know. It seems that a faith thats worth something as mentioned would make Acid Culture unnecessary. Rather, a crack in the faith, or feeling of a discrepency inbetween religion/hope and reality could foster a need for a fix such as Acid Culture. Nice one, gd779.
posted by uni verse at 2:34 PM on March 19, 2005

jonmc: fingers? There are separate fingers? Where did you get that idea?

This is interesting, nofundy. Thanks. I'll be back when I've read it all and thought a little about it.
posted by koeselitz at 2:34 PM on March 19, 2005

jonmc, you left off the last bit of mrgrimm's comment, i.e the belief in discrete objects.

Have you ever tried to teach a discrete math class? Most students don't believe in it (or so it would seem from their test scores).
posted by casu marzu at 2:36 PM on March 19, 2005

it's worth pointing out that Godel's incompleteness theorem demonstrated that no machine, no computer, will ever be able to exhaust the truths of mathematics.

OK, thats a really hinky interpretation of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, gd779.

Really, really, really hinky. That theorem says there are correct systems based on axioms that can't be proven correct. Thus, there are true formulas that are not provably true.

Really not what you are saying, at all.
posted by teece at 2:38 PM on March 19, 2005

jonmc, you left off the last bit of mrgrimm's comment, i.e the belief in discrete objects.

I know. I was just making with the laff-laff. Feeding me straight lines is a dangerous thing.

Carry on.


Have you ever tried to teach a discrete math class?

Taught? I don't think I've ever taken one since up until this moment, I did not know such a thing existed, honestly.
posted by jonmc at 2:41 PM on March 19, 2005

I was just making with the laff-laff.

ok, me too.
posted by casu marzu at 2:44 PM on March 19, 2005

jonmc: Discrete math classes don't exist. We're just in one big math class, learning together.
posted by koeselitz at 2:50 PM on March 19, 2005

jonmc: Discrete math classes don't exist. We're just in one big math class, learning together.

Not me. I ditched and I'm out drinking schnapps under the bleachers with the rest of the burnouts. We've got plenty, come on in. ;)
posted by jonmc at 2:52 PM on March 19, 2005

Teece, "We kill each other in the name of religion, sure, but we were going to kill each other any way."
About WWI and two, i agree. But about all those deaths over that little stretch of land in Israel, where religions collide, I don't think they were going to do it anyway.
About which we base our beliefs on, imagination or reality, consider this:
Hadith number 2,562 in the collection known as the Sunan al-Tirmidhi says, "The least [reward] for the people of Heaven is 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome of pearls, aquamarine and ruby. Or consider the seven headed beast of the Revelation. Or the 21 armed budda. How are these things rationalized? Somehow, people like to believe in imaginative things, in a place far, far, away from reality.
posted by uni verse at 2:52 PM on March 19, 2005

On the idea of religion being the root of man's evil: I say nonsense. The root of man's evil is his evil nature.

I'll agree with this, but say that the greatest evil is achieved when man's religion gives him an avenue to act out the more murderous fantasies of his evil nature.

As a scientist -- an irreligious one at that -- I've grown really tired of the phony science vs. religious dichotomy that so many people seem so fond of. This guy seems to be trotting out the same fallacy as so many others -- namely, that if we could just get everyone to consider things rationally for a few minutes, they would logically conclude that their religious beliefs contradict reason, and let go of them.

Maybe, but is there any doubt that in the United States, at least we are most decidedly not wallowing in an age of reason?

What this country needs is a new enlightenment; but what is happening, instead, is that people are reacting en masse to the growing complexity of life, both ethical and technological, by withdrawing into a cocoon of religion; looking for moorings. That's a natural reaction, I suppose, but here is where I think Harris's observations are salient: When you embrace a specific brand of religion, particularly a more conservative brand, you are necessarily saying that all other faiths are wrong, blasphemous. It's only through our more moderate, or liberal, traditions that we "permit" other religions to exist.
posted by kgasmart at 3:03 PM on March 19, 2005

gd779: Apropros of a thread below this one, it's worth pointing out that Godel's incompleteness theorem demonstrated that no machine, no computer, will ever be able to exhaust the truths of mathematics. It follows immediately, as Godel himself pointed out, that if we are able to grasp these truths, then our minds must not be machines or computers.

You may wish to re-read that article, because you have it wrong. "If computers run according to formal systems and our minds provably don’t, not even in knowing arithmetic, then does this mean that our minds are provably not computers? Gödel himself, rigorous logician that he was, was reluctant to draw so conclusive a conclusion; he hedged it in logically important ways."

As to conflicting beliefs causing wars. I've always had the unsubstantiated theory that most wars, even if they appear to be religious in nature, are underneath it all simply about fighting over limited resources. Of course, that's just my belief.
posted by Bort at 3:10 PM on March 19, 2005

what this country needs is an IQ test to run for president. // end snark
posted by uni verse at 3:13 PM on March 19, 2005

.
posted by eustacescrubb at 3:20 PM on March 19, 2005

OK, thats a really hinky interpretation of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, gd779.

Well, as I noted, it was Godel's interpretation of the Incompleteness Theorem, not mine. I suppose he would know what his own theorem meant.

gd779 -- which truths of mathematics that are unprovable do we grasp? Why do you think they're unprovable, and why do you think we [all?] grasp them?

Well, there are plenty of places on the web that will explain Godel's theorem, and they would likely do a better job of proving it than I could. So I will defer to them.

On Preview: ou may wish to re-read that article, because you have it wrong.

Hmm. I'd never read that article. I read this article, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm am completely unequipped to resolve the dispute, except to say that the Chronicle has always been highly reliable, and I have no idea what "Butterflies and Wheels" is. I will note that, in any event, even Butterflies and Wheels goes on to say this, which comes immediately after the section you quoted:

Other important thinkers, however, have drawn precisely this conclusion. Just such an argument served as the basis, for example, of Roger Penrose’s two celebrated books, “The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind.” He used Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to argue that our minds’ activities exceed what can be programmed into computers.

So, at a minimum, Godel advanced some version of the idea that his theorem implies that our minds cannot be computers, and later thinkers have either concurred or expanded this conclusion. The point, however, remains substantially the same, it seems to me. If we can know truths that can't be proven mechanically from axioms, then it appears obvious that our mind doesn't derive knowledge mechanically from axioms. It must, therefore, not work as a computer would work, or it must have some other source of knowledge. Or am I misunderstanding the theorem?
posted by gd779 at 3:21 PM on March 19, 2005

This fellow's arguments sound like they rest on some interesting assumptions. Here's the best place I can think of to start from:

from the link: "Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths."

I should say: falsely. Islam in particular has from the start been a faith that accepted the diversity of paths. The practical impact of this belief is the fact that four groups of people (Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Sabians) are to be allowed to live in the society which the Prophet (on whom be peace) founded. There is to be toleration of all of them, although Islamic society obviously takes an Islamic cast. In fact, Mr. Harris might be interested to note that there have been many times in history when Islamic society has been extremely tolerant, and, in some ways, more tolerant than Western society is today.

I'd argue, if it weren't risking a derail, that all of this is true of Christianity and Judaism as well. The exclusivity exhibited by one small sect of Christianity today, I would say, is based on a misunderstanding of the inherent nature of Christianity; and I defy anyone to come up with a number of historical situations in which Jews were unwilling to tolerate religious diversity around them.

In the first chapter, he goes on to misuse Biblical verses in the same way that people have been doing since Baruch Spinoza. I strongly doubt that he's considered the Talmud, for example, in forming his position on what the Bible says. That is to say: his view of religion seems to be quite divorced even from what ordinary religious people think of religion. That's probably why he's not very good at talking about religion.

"It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence."

This is an unwarranted statement. Mr. Harris refuses even to wonder about this possibility: what if God does exist? What if it's possible to know whether he exists? What's more, from where did we get this strange notion that all knowledge must be experimentally verifiable? If one believes that there is a truth that can be known about the universe, then one is admitting that something that isn't material exists, indeed that the highest and most universal thing is not material. One very good basis for such a belief is religious; which is why science was borne of religion.

Mr. Harris goes on to say something interesting, however:

"This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price— by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions— Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to do this."

This sounds contradictory to me. We cannot 'fulfill our needs' through scientific understanding-- yet we need "no faith in untestable propositions" to do so? Isn't scientific understanding merely the testing of propositions? I somehow doubt that the mysticism which Mr. Harris implies is really something he subscribes to.

kgasmart: "What this country needs is a new enlightenment..."

Interestingly, the first enlightenment doesn't seem to have worked.
posted by koeselitz at 3:22 PM on March 19, 2005

I see what you are saying, uni verse, but I still think that says a lot more about people than religion. Why is there fighting in Israel? It has nothing to do with religion -- it has everything to do with the usual economic particulars: land, property, etc. and the usual cultural ones to help motivate the fighting: our group, our religion, etc.

Humans have very useful imaginations -- so useful that it can work against them. Which is exactly what happens, I think, with religious fundamentalists of any stripe. But to me, that tells me something about human nature, not religious nature.
posted by teece at 3:23 PM on March 19, 2005

Teece, well, considering war goes against the universal themes of peace in faith, there are discrepancies in my saying faith is the cause. But it would be alot harder to recruit without it. But also, as is being mentioned in other arguments, we don't think like computers; a computer would not look at this data and say, yes, do to the existence of [this religion/god] those opponents must be neutralized. It would notice the many contradictions inbetween faith and murder. Ultimately isn't it the flaw of human emotions; to believe in spite of the evidence, and the flaw in our ability; to suspend our intelligence (denial/ self-delusion) when we want to.
posted by uni verse at 3:39 PM on March 19, 2005

Interestingly, the first enlightenment doesn't seem to have worked.
Cleary, they haven't read, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in a Few Days" (for you SF readers).
posted by uni verse at 3:42 PM on March 19, 2005

But about all those deaths over that little stretch of land in Israel, where religions collide, I don't think they were going to do it anyway

You honestly think that's a religious dispute, and not an argument about which families get to own which plots of dirt?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:01 PM on March 19, 2005

Interestingly, the first enlightenment doesn't seem to have worked.

Nah, it just didn't stick.
posted by kgasmart at 4:02 PM on March 19, 2005

So, at a minimum, Godel advanced some version of the idea that his theorem implies that our minds cannot be computers, and later thinkers have either concurred or expanded this conclusion.

Well, no, at a minimum, from what you quoted "other important thinkers" advanced that idea, not Godel. :)

Or am I misunderstanding the theorem?

I believe you are drawing the wrong conclusion from the theorem. However, this is far fram a settled issue - and I am not well versed in it enough to provide a decent summary of either side.

I did find an interesting tid bit (from wiki) that indicates that Goedel did not believe that his theorem showed that our minds are not computers but that "he believed that human beings had an intuitive, not just computational, way of arriving at truth and that therefore his theorem did not limit what can be known to be true by humans." I.E., he assumes we are not computers, and therefore, his theorem does not apply to us.
posted by Bort at 4:03 PM on March 19, 2005

Well, as someone who has been called an anti-religious extremist (with some justification), I'll have to read this book. I'll have to read it in its entirety rather than passing judgement on a few excerpts, I think. But I do like the fact that he seems to be attacking "moderate" religious belief as well as the more overtly insane variety, as this is one of my own particular bugbears.

...he maintains that “moderation” in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict.

Yes, but I go further: what such accommodation blinds us to is that the acceptance of inherently irrational beliefs supports a more general, simmering, low-level noise of unreason which pollutes our societies and our thinking. We can see the results of this acceptance not only at the sharp end of extremism but also in the way we have retreated from enlightenment. It is now acceptable to profess admiration for the most outrageously unsupported and unreasonable nonsense (think astrology and all manner of "new age" horseshit) where it would have been embarrassing to do so perhaps only thirty or forty years ago.

But why pick on religion? Simple.Because religion is a category of thoroughly irrational belief which exists at a higher quantum level of respect. The concepts of blasphemy and apostasy, for example, and actual laws based on those notions, do not exist for other beliefs, by and large. Religion and religious believers are afforded a level of respect and (often) a legal status that simply does not exist for those other beliefs. We hear all the time that one should respect the beliefs of the religious, yet I have never heard a single good reason why this is so. And that is the problem. There is no sound justification for granting a religious belief the slightest iota more respect than any other belief, yet for some baffling reason the sensibilities of the religious are coddled and indulged (and often protected by law). This makes it more dangerous. It is as if we feel driven to make religion the irrationality it's OK to indulge in.

I'm glad someone is attacking that. I shall read the book.
posted by Decani at 4:12 PM on March 19, 2005

"consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: ... Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts."

To which casu marzu replied: "How would this be a change from my current experience?"

Because it might negatively impact the effectiveness of the Illuminati implant you were given soon after birth.
posted by davy at 4:14 PM on March 19, 2005

koeselitz: Interestingly, the first enlightenment doesn't seem to have worked.

kgasmart: Nah, it just didn't stick.

It could never stick. This is the point. Genuine religious faith is not a conventional subjective "belief" of the kind that Harris appears to assume it to be. He nominally acknowledges the "sacred dimension to our existence," but does not genuinely seem to account for it. This dimension does, as he says, involve more than merely understanding the world. It also involves more than merely understanding our place in the world. It consists in an ineradicable yearning to know that our tawdry, transitory lives participate in something not only transcendent and true, but beautiful as well. Can the average fundamentalist express this religious impulse in words? Likely not. But this is not to deny its power. It seems to be a fundamental condition of human life, and perhaps therefore the fundamental problem of human political life.

It is indeed interesting that the conscious attempt to re-found politics on a more secular basis had the result of undermining all public religiousity and perhaps all religiousity as such. Whether or not this was contrary to the aims of the founders of modernity (Hobbes, Spinoza, et al, who did wrestle with the problem in all of its considerable depth) is debatable; clearly, however, they did not foresee the equally distressing consequences of the spiritual void in which we now live. What consequences? Quoting from one of the reviews linked on the author's site:

The End of Faith has other important gaps, Stalin and Hitler being resident in one of them. Harris glancingly refers to communism and fascism as cults, but essentially ducks the problem of secular monstrosity.

As for the supporters of malign secular deities, nationalism has often been as effective an animating force for atrocity as religion, a point Harris never makes. Shinto and Buddhism hardly demanded Japan’s barbaric forays throughout Asia. For that matter, toxic intolerance—currently popular hereabouts as “zero tolerance”—runs left and right around the world. It plays out more dangerously in Tehran than in Toronto, but the dynamic is everywhere and religion is hardly the only cudgel.

Yet what of the virtues religions plausibly claim? Harris doesn’t deny that ethical behaviour, community support and spiritual experience can derive from religious practice, but argues that religion is unnecessary to produce these. Unexpectedly, he not only embraces the value of spiritual effort but—again raising the flag for empirical observation—believes “investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice.”

....

And underpinning if not overriding the discussion is nature. Our pretensions to the contrary, animal nature continues to frame a rather large window onto human nature. Tyranny, murder and rape are all normative in the animal world, and pacifism, liberality and monogamy are exceptional. Humans have demonstrated their distinction in these regards mainly when their social structures vigorously reinforce those distinctions.

Is religion the best mode for enforcing such distinctions? Perhaps a better question would be, in its absence - and Islamic fundamentalism is not its rebirth, but rather its death rattle - what else do we have?
posted by Urban Hermit at 4:17 PM on March 19, 2005

Well, no, at a minimum, from what you quoted "other important thinkers" advanced that idea, not Godel. :)

Ah, but from what you quoted, Godel did advance the idea, he just "hedged it". So either it was entirely Godel's idea (my source), or it's Godel's idea, but he hedged, but later thinkers have said that the hedging wasn't necessary (your source). What difference that makes, I don't know. But, either way, the idea that the Incompletness Theorem indicates that our minds cannot be computers seems to originate with Godel.
posted by gd779 at 4:23 PM on March 19, 2005

In general, Harris seems to be boldly going where Locke, Jefferson, and approximately 6.02E+23 others went hundreds of years ago, heavily leavened with bullshit sessions straight out of late night at the first-year dorms.

I'm not sure where he gets the idea that you move out of biblical literalism into something more "tolerant," when biblical literalism is itself a fairly recent invention after thousands of years of more thoughtful and considered interpretation. People like Aquinas and Augustine were not literalists.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man.

Uh-huh. 'Cuz this hasn't been a topic of discussion for hundreds of years.

Also, if it were true, we'd expect that avowedly secular or atheist regimes to be somehow more tolerant or better places to be than anywhere else, and especially regimes with an official religion, and that just ain't true.

Also also, how can you possibly disentangle the effects of religion from those of simple tribalism when religious differences are strongly linked to tribal and national lines and often seem to serve more as tribal markers than anything else?

Even his beginning example is downright stupid. We know, or can bet, that the young man is not merely muslim. We can bet that he's poor, that he's been promised great things for himself and his family, that he's poorly educated, that he has essentially no legitimate prospects for employment, and that these people who've convinced him to blow himself and others to tiny bits were the first people in a long time to act like he was important.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:25 PM on March 19, 2005

So, at a minimum, Godel advanced some version of the idea that his theorem implies that our minds cannot be computers, and later thinkers have either concurred or expanded this conclusion. The point, however, remains substantially the same, it seems to me. If we can know truths that can't be proven mechanically from axioms, then it appears obvious that our mind doesn't derive knowledge mechanically from axioms. It must, therefore, not work as a computer would work, or it must have some other source of knowledge. Or am I misunderstanding the theorem?

I'd say that you are fundamentally misunderstanding the theorem. What it says is that there are things that will always be true, that really seem true to us, and that in all likelihood are true (for some definition of true), but that can not be proven true. That theorem shows a fundamental weakness it set theory -- it doesn't tell us anything much about God without a whole lot of extrapolation that moves completely away from the basis of the theorem.
posted by teece at 4:26 PM on March 19, 2005

The ideas of God and Paradise have not persisted simply because they are ingrained, but because (I think) they are as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago.

It's funny you should say that, because I happen to be reading Plato on the soul these days, and I am consistently surprised by the presentation of the beliefs of "the regular folks" - it's generally assumed that the average man doesn't believe in a separable soul, but thinks of it perhaps as a kind of 'tuning' of the body in one analogy - ie, the arrangement of the matter. And socrates talks about how when he was young he made the common sense assumption that the body grows and moves because it takes in air and food - ie, is a machine - and for no other reason.

In the Phaedo, Socrates is about to be put to death, and basically the dialogue tries to find a more hopeful possibility, that something of socrates will survive after he drinks the hemlock, but again, what strikes me is how they always say that the common man assumes the material nature, etc.

In other words, I guess, it's not a given that the majority of folks start from an assumption of belief. I'm not saying that you're entirely off base, as clearly death and the general mystery of consciousness cause humans to consider what the 'first cause' of the mind is, so to speak (why does matter arrange itself toward understanding itself?), but I don't think it's a given that in all cultures a literal understanding of an afterlife or a heaven or a personal god is foundational. Writers & philosophers throughout history have spoken of "God" because of the need for a "first cause", but they didn't necessarily mean god in any sort of personal/christian kind of way. And what the majority believed isn't necessarily knowable from the writings of a few anyway.
posted by mdn at 4:26 PM on March 19, 2005

Unless people learn to differentiate between "idea" and "impression" and "belief" I don't see how we can take discussions like this seriously.

And: "It consists in an ineradicable yearning to know that our tawdry, transitory lives participate in something not only transcendent and true, but beautiful as well."

A what? Can you explain that concept in words of one or two syllables? Then please tell us why we'd bother with such a thing?

Oh. and ROU_Xenophobe, don't you think it's quite possible that a well-educated atheist with good career prospects whose mama did not dress him funny and whose buds think he's neat-o might still "blow himself and others to tiny bits"?
posted by davy at 4:31 PM on March 19, 2005

MetaFilter: too deep for hip-boots.
posted by davy at 4:32 PM on March 19, 2005

Decani: what such accommodation blinds us to is that the acceptance of inherently irrational beliefs supports a more general, simmering, low-level noise of unreason which pollutes our societies and our thinking. We can see the results of this acceptance not only at the sharp end of extremism but also in the way we have retreated from enlightenment.

I think the failure of the modern enlightenment should invite us to reflect on whether it is more realistic to view irrationality as a "pollution" of human nature and human society, or as an inherent characteristic of them - a characteristic that, in our prudence, we should attempt to account for, but one that we only attempt to eradicate at our great peril.

It is now acceptable to profess admiration for the most outrageously unsupported and unreasonable nonsense (think astrology and all manner of "new age" horseshit)

Harris makes a similar point - he likens religion to alchemy in its ability to capture our fascination, and hopes it will similarly vanish in the light of reason. This, as I've tried to argue above, might be to badly misconstrue the nature of the religious impulse in man.

But why pick on religion? Simple.Because religion is a category of thoroughly irrational belief which exists at a higher quantum level of respect.

Is it merely this, or does religion in fact exist at a "higher quantum level" of epistemology - i.e., it does not have for believers the status of a mere "opinion" that can either be validated by objective evidence, or not. It exists, for them, beyond the realm in which reason and observation can confirm or not confirm opinions and hypotheses. It seems unproductive, therefore, and perhaps a bit ignorant, to confront believers with supposed "horseshit" like inconsistencies and controversies in their conflicting sacred texts. Of course reason will triumph on that battlefield, but the issue in the first place is whether it is the right one.
posted by Urban Hermit at 4:34 PM on March 19, 2005

Is religion the best mode for enforcing such distinctions? Perhaps a better question would be, in its absence - and Islamic fundamentalism is not its rebirth, but rather its death rattle - what else do we have?

We have secular dogmatisms that ultimately occupy the same place - as you (or the reviewer) accurately points out.

Were I a Christian, I would consider the sort of fundamentalism followed by so many in the U.S. to be almost akin to blasphemy. It is an offensive, selective reading of the Bible - but then that's Harris's point; in this country, at least, any interpretation of the Bible is going to be selective, is going to omit some aspects yet pound repeatedly on others - often from the same chapter and verse.

I always like how the fundies trot out Leviticus 18:22-23 to condemn homosexuality; as per the Dr. Laura letter, how many are wearing cotton/poly blend shirts in direct violation of Leviticus 19:19?

For my money, there are 2 kinds of Christianity (and maybe this is true about other religions as well): The type that is primarily interested in alleviating the suffering of others, and the type that is interested in controlling others. There's cross-pollination, of course, but the type of religion ascendant in the U.S. is largely about control. Where is its sense of social justice? Ah, it's more important to prevent gays from getting married.

And it's this kind of faith-based impulse that has resulted in so many dead people over the centuries.
posted by kgasmart at 4:38 PM on March 19, 2005

davy: Can you explain that concept in words of one or two syllables? Then please tell us why we'd bother with such a thing?

It's part of why we feel sad when someone dies, and part of why we don't. It's part of why we fear our death, and part of why we don't. It's why we lie awake at night sometimes and wonder what it's all for. Or maybe you don't.

Why we'd bother with such a thing? Most of us don't anymore - that's my point. Most of us don't even care that we don't:

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you the last man.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"- so asks the last man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.

"We have discovered happiness"- say the last men, and they blink.

Too deep for hip boots? Put on a wetsuit and dive, man. The good stuff is down deep near the bottom."
posted by Urban Hermit at 4:52 PM on March 19, 2005

hmm...

kgasmart: "Were I a Christian, I would consider the sort of fundamentalism followed by so many in the U.S. to be almost akin to blasphemy."

(By the way, I agree, and I do think it's blasphemy.)

"It is an offensive, selective reading of the Bible - but then that's Harris's point; in this country, at least, any interpretation of the Bible is going to be selective, is going to omit some aspects yet pound repeatedly on others - often from the same chapter and verse."

I disagree strongly. Christianity has had ages when it had great teachers that brought wise leadership to the faith-- say, in Alexandria between 250 and 500 AD-- and ages when it had bad teachers. What American Christianity needs right now is better teachers. That need isn't a product of Christianity, it's common to mankind.

"For my money, there are 2 kinds of Christianity (and maybe this is true about other religions as well): The type that is primarily interested in alleviating the suffering of others, and the type that is interested in controlling others. There's cross-pollination, of course, but the type of religion ascendant in the U.S. is largely about control. Where is its sense of social justice? Ah, it's more important to prevent gays from getting married."

I believe you're trying to say that Christianity can live within a secular society without contradicting itself by focussing on service. I think maybe that's true, but there's another question pressing right now. A lot of Muslims are concerned at the moment about the secularism in the west, and we westerners need to be able to say whether they're right to be concerned. Their answer to your point, I think, would be: what if you have to control others somewhat in order to alleviate suffering? 'Controlling others to alleviate suffering' seems, at the very least, to be the principle of government; so it's not really so far-fetched.
posted by koeselitz at 5:01 PM on March 19, 2005

Btw, if you want to hear it directly from the author, Sam Harris will be on BookTV this sunday night at 12:15.
posted by McSly at 5:06 PM on March 19, 2005

Kudos for the shout-out to Uncle Fritz, Urban Hermit.

Since I haven't read the book (yet), I'll just say my piece/peace and move on:

What of the idea that Harris (erroneously) equates religion with the Abrahamic faiths? Again, this is largely speculative since I'm working off book reviews and the first chapter alone, but I think you could work up a fruitful thesis that explains both the persistence *and* terrible destruction wreaked in the name of religions like Christianity and Islam by isolating the more problematic aspects of monotheism per se, and not just spirituality or arational belief or the innate need for significance or the sacred or whatever.

I really don't want to derail, so file it under "something to think about" or ignore this and move on, but there's something about the combination of belief in personal immortality conditioned on the judgment of an all-powerful deity that's proven terribly effective and, effectively, terrible. Not all arational forms of "spiritual" belief hinge on these (to me) terrible notions of judgment, punishment, vengeance, blood sacrifice, and the like. If anything, it strikes me as a particularly infantile (though presumably "necessary") stage in our spiritual evolution. (I see all kinds of parallels at the level of individual behavior and belief, but that's another thread entirely ... )

I'm largely with Harris, but (again, haven't read the whole book) it seems like a classic case of pick-your-battles. Believe me, we'll have our hands full regardless. No need to throw the Buddha out with the Baalwater.
posted by joe lisboa at 5:07 PM on March 19, 2005

I always like how the fundies trot out Leviticus 18:22-23 to condemn homosexuality; as per the Dr. Laura letter, how many are wearing cotton/poly blend shirts in direct violation of Leviticus 19:19?

More pointedly, how many take Leviticus 25 as seriously?

--------------------------------

Sam Harris is an atheist fundamentalist.

That is all.
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:09 PM on March 19, 2005

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.

Not if a quantum of belief is immediately coupled to a corresponding quantum of doubt, opening up the field for continuing investigations of beliefs and corresponding doubts. On another tree it seems to resonate with Popper's observation, no?
posted by semmi at 5:10 PM on March 19, 2005

don't you think it's quite possible that a well-educated atheist with good career prospects whose mama did not dress him funny and whose buds think he's neat-o might still "blow himself and others to tiny bits"?

Sure, but that's not the tendency among the current crop of people going boom, which is the point. Harris's statement that we just can't know the educational level, or prosperity, of a suicide bomber is just hogwash; we can make damn good guesses about those things.

If nothing else, a well-educated yadda yadda could simply be drafted, or told that his family will be killed if he doesn't, or that he'll be killed in a more painful way if he doesn't, or he could be a patriot, or he might prefer the idea of a glorious death to a tedious and unimportant life, or for any number of other reasons.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:15 PM on March 19, 2005

I believe you're trying to say that Christianity can live within a secular society without contradicting itself by focussing on service.

I say that Christianity, at its core, seems to me to be entirely about service. This determination to eradicate poverty and injustice as a matter of faith is the most inspirational aspect of Christianity, as far as I'm concerned.

But again, how much time does your average fundamentalist evangelical sit around fretting about the people in America who go hungry at night, versus the amount of time they sit around stewing about gay marriage or abortion?

"Controlling others to alleviate suffering" might be how the fundies would describe what they are trying to do. But at the end of the day, I believe their attempt to exert control is the end in itself; it's not a matter of, You should live your life this way because better health/spiritual well-being/greater prosperity will be the result. It is, You should live your life this way because God says so and perhaps as important, because I say so.
posted by kgasmart at 5:25 PM on March 19, 2005

kgasmart: I agree that Christianity is about service, although I'm still trying to understand what that means. But I also believe that, so long as the world is the way it is, it's impossible to eradicate poverty and injustice without controlling people.

The fact that a lot of people want to exert power in order to salve their own feeling of impotence might not mean that justice doesn't require an exertion of power. And what if religion can exert power in a good way, bringing justice and decreasing poverty?
posted by koeselitz at 5:43 PM on March 19, 2005

how much time does your average fundamentalist evangelical sit around fretting about the people in America who go hungry at night, versus the amount of time they sit around stewing about gay marriage or abortion?

To be charitable to their position: they likely believe that the prospect of eternal damnation is far more important than earthly privation. (I'm not sure how I became the spokesman for fundamentalists in this thread, but since there don't seem to be any around MeFi...)

I'm not sure the issue is whether Christianity can exist as a faith dedicated to service as opposed to social control. That does seem consistent with its teachings. The question is whether it, or any faith, can meaningfully exist if they can no longer assert or even believe for themselves that their moral teachings are the Truth.
posted by Urban Hermit at 5:44 PM on March 19, 2005

I was thinking about this sort of thing this morning. As an atheist, I respect other people's right to believe in whatever hokum gets them through the night. Yet they are free to give me pamphlets in the street to try and convert me to their faith thing. But if I were to wander about trying to unconvert people it would create tension. I don't like the 'untouchable' aspect of religion. It should be questioned. Yes, they do good things but you can do good things without believing in some imaginary dude in the sky. It's like a criminal on drugs and a criminal not on drugs. I'll take the straight crim any day, as they are likely to be more rational. As with religious (and I hate the term) do-gooders as opposed to simply good people.
/Trying to not get too fired up
posted by Bdave at 6:45 PM on March 19, 2005

I say that Christianity, at its core, seems to me to be entirely about service.

I'm glad you qualified that, kgasmart, because it seems to me (as someone raised and educated K thru BA in the thoroughly liberal social-justice wing of contemporary Roman Catholicism) that your interpretation of Christianity in this way requires a fairly selective reading of the Christian scriptures. If I had to pick-and-choose what to emphasize in the tradition, I'd side with you, of course. But my concern has to do with this picking-and-choosing to begin with.

I'm not just snarking, and if I could wave a wand and turn all the hardcore fire-and-brimstone fundies into love-and-feed-your-neighbor types, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But your reading seems to brush aside the core doctrines that distinguish the "message" of Christianity from just any other ethic. Doctrines like hell (Jesus himself promises "eternal punishment" to unbelievers in Matt 25:46) and the fact that our fallen state (the fault of our forebears, mind you) can only be atoned for vicariously through a god-human sacrifice, for instance.

On my reading, these seem precisely like the core elements of Christianity that distinguish it from just another "Take care of yourselves - and each other." golden-rule pick-me-up life philosophy. I have a hard time seeing how one could separate, say, the content of the Sermon on the Mount while ignoring what, precisely, it's punctuated with: the threat of hell-fire without stripping Christianity of everything that renders it unique.

And let me be clear: I think its unique elements are awful, which is why I squirm when folks invoke the elements of Christianity (e.g., service / compassion / etc.) that are wholly unoriginal as if they represented the beating heart of the religion, when its metaphysical core seems (again, to me) to be closer to a narrative about a fall from an ideal state and redemption from that fall via human sacrifice.
posted by joe lisboa at 7:01 PM on March 19, 2005

... and the promise of eternal reward / threat of eternal punishment that hangs over "buying into" the narrative or jumping through the right hoops or whatever.
posted by joe lisboa at 7:05 PM on March 19, 2005

To be charitable to their position: they likely believe that the prospect of eternal damnation is far more important than earthly privation.

I've actually had fundies tell me that they believe abortion is the ultimate social justice issue. Coming from where they come from, I can perhaps see how they'd arrive at that conclusion.

And as to the social control issue, religion has been one of the major reasons there has been social control over the centures; religion keeps an orderly society, though not necessarily one that is just.
posted by kgasmart at 7:22 PM on March 19, 2005

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man.

Heh, who is this 'we'? The smart, rational, right-thinking, humane people of the world? I always wonder about thinkers like this, what exactly they expect the future to look like and what special sub-section of humanity they imagine themselves to belong to. And I always think they must have watched Star Trek while growing up and believe in The Federation. Seriously, they seem think some smart, rational, right-thinking, humane political entity is going to arise to rule, benevolently and with deepest wisdom of course, not only the whole human race but also the entire 'good guy' part of the known universe.

I can just see Picard commenting to Riker: "Yes Number One, we were slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuated man's inhumanity to man."
posted by scheptech at 8:13 PM on March 19, 2005

religion has been one of the major reasons there has been social control over the centures; religion keeps an orderly society, though not necessarily one that is just.
posted by kgasmart at 10:22 PM EST on March 19

Absolutely agree. I find it sad that the poorer certain communities are, the more churches seem to spring up everywhere. Religion works as social control and I don't quite understand why. Unless you truly hate yourself, the poorer you are, the less you should believe in religion.
posted by Jim Jones at 8:18 PM on March 19, 2005

So I'm not sure how one criticizes the "irrationality" of faith. We all operate on faith. Without faith, reason can't get started.

There's a major difference between foundational beliefs and irrational blind faith. Things like the accuracy of perception, the existance of the external world, the general reliability of memory, and the continuity of thought are generally regarded as needing no justification, to avoid endless epistemic regress. However, they are all things that are necessary to avoid skepticism and have a belief structure at all, and they are all things which seem to be true and are consistant with reliable observations.

Religion doesn't fit those criteria; you don't have to believe in any faith to avoid skepticism and most major religions are blatantly inconsistant with scientific observation. There's no reason to take it as a foundational belief. Because of this, religions should be treated as scientific theories, with the net result that nearly all of them are immediately thrown out as being contradictory, lacking predictive power, or being impossible to disprove. To believe them anyway would be to believe in something without justification or evidence, which is poor intellectual integrity, and unethical.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:43 PM on March 19, 2005

Things like the accuracy of perception, the existance of the external world, the general reliability of memory, and the continuity of thought are generally regarded as needing no justification, to avoid endless epistemic regress.

You're hitting on some of the right questions, but it goes quite a bit deeper than that. Even if your argument here is right, you still can't form reliable beliefs on the basis of reason alone.

You suggest that religion, like presumably all beliefs, should be treated like a scientific theory and tested against experience. This implies some sort of empiricist epistemology, which is common enough. The trouble is that Quine demonstrated persuasively in his challenging paper The Two Dogmas of Empiricism that our beliefs about anything but the most bare sense impressions are not rationally justifiable. Empiricism hasn't been the same since. And so it's my argument that, as Dante pointed out long ago, even if you grant empiricism as the sole and oncontroversial source of knowledge, reason still "has short wings". It can't take you very far at all - it basically can't take you past immediate sense perception. Because any statement more complicated than "I see a chair in this room" is supported by innumerable strands of other beliefs in a web, which are connected only indirectly with sense perception. As a result, almost any belief can be held rationally true in the face of any evidence, provided that you're willing to make drastic enough changes to the rest of your web.

Now, it takes hard, disciplined thought to see this logical reality, because human beings aren't wired to think this way. We are rationalizing rather than rational creatures, and when we get a belief to cohere with our existing web of beliefs our brain goes "eh, good enough" and we feel as if the belief is rationally justified. And then we're very puzzled (even angry) when other people feel rationally justified in contradictory beliefs. The answer to this puzzle is not that "if everyone were just as rational as I am, we'd all have The Truth". The answer is that we're not being rational either - we can't be that rational, because reason just doesn't have those kinds of answers to give.

Reason can tell us the implications of our most basic beliefs, and can help us to clear up contradictions in the web of beliefs, making it cohere better and better aligning it with the perceptions at the edge of the web. But it can't give us truth, because the decisions about which strands of belief to adjust in response to a conceptual puzzle are necessarily arational.
posted by gd779 at 9:58 PM on March 19, 2005

you don't have to believe in any faith to avoid skepticism

Didn't see that the first time around. This is just clearly wrong.

Empiricism is a faith. Don't believe me? How do you justify it rationally? As I pointed out earlier, if you justify it on the basis of empirical observation, then your argument is irrational and circular. If you justify it on the basis of something other than empiricism, then how do you justify that other thing? And what's the justification below that? And so on. It's the infinite regress problem. If you're a foundationalist, and it sounds like you are, you have to have faith somewhere in there. It's a logical necessity - it can't be turtles all the way down.

There's no reason to take it as a foundational belief.

If you are looking for (or requiring a reason) then, by definition, it's not a foundational belief. Foundational beliefs must be unjustified. Because the moment you provide a justification, that justification has become your true foundation.

One implication of this is that you can't compare foundational beliefs - no foundational belief can be said to be more "rational" than another (well, not in the sense you mean the word "rational" anyway - we could get into some discussions of philosophical rationalism, but I don't think that's what you're advocating here).
posted by gd779 at 10:06 PM on March 19, 2005

Unless you truly hate yourself, the poorer you are, the less you should believe in religion.

I don't know about that.


One of the reasons I think Christianity, for example, has endured over the centuries is that in addition to all we might find abhorrent about it in a forum like this, it has been a source of incalculable beauty, as well. Know anyone who's had Bible readings about love during their wedding?

The perception of a god as you struggle beneath forces you can never hope to control is, I think, probably a universal yearning. So even when life is shit, you can think, "well, it could be shittier."

Social control, like they said.
posted by kgasmart at 10:30 PM on March 19, 2005

Reason can tell us the implications of our most basic beliefs, and can help us to clear up contradictions in the web of beliefs, making it cohere better and better aligning it with the perceptions at the edge of the web. But it can't give us truth, because the decisions about which strands of belief to adjust in response to a conceptual puzzle are necessarily arational.

That's true, which is why most modern empiricists believe that you must employ observation as well as reason to get anywhere. Of course, empiricism still has significant problems, but I haven't encountered any other good system.

you don't have to believe in any faith to avoid skepticism

Didn't see that the first time around. This is just clearly wrong.

Empiricism is a faith. Don't believe me? How do you justify it rationally? As I pointed out earlier, if you justify it on the basis of empirical observation, then your argument is irrational and circular. If you justify it on the basis of something other than empiricism, then how do you justify that other thing? And what's the justification below that? And so on. It's the infinite regress problem. If you're a foundationalist, and it sounds like you are, you have to have faith somewhere in there. It's a logical necessity - it can't be turtles all the way down.

First of all, I meant the word 'faith' as used as a synonym for religion. Probably not the best word choice.

Secondly, the reasons for taking a belief as fundamental are not justifications. A justification is a reason for believing 'x' is true, our reasons for taking a belief as fundamental are reasons for treating 'x' to be true. We are not trying to prove the fundamental beliefs, we are giving reasons they should be taken as proven. It's not the same.


Surely there must be judgement used in taking fundamental beliefs, else you could end up with something ridiculous (I take it as fundamental I don't have to breath! *thud*) Criteria used to determine fundamental beliefs usually include being self-evident or obvious, being required to avoid skepticism, and being consistant with all observation.

Since these criteria are a product of the belief system, it is circular in a sense. However, it fixes the main problem with straight coherantism, which is allowing a place for fundamental justification to enter the belief system. It's not perfect, but barring a failure in a fundamental belief (which requires something totally crazy like the brain in the vat scenario) it should be valid.

Also, remember that throwing out empiricism doesn't make religion win, it makes skepticism win. Throwing out rational or observational belief structures means you have to find a valid system, it doesn't mean you can just make stuff up or believe what makes you happy.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:39 PM on March 19, 2005

First of all, I meant the word 'faith' as used as a synonym for religion.

That makes your argument much more clear. My bad.

the reasons for taking a belief as fundamental are not justifications. A justification is a reason for believing 'x' is true, our reasons for taking a belief as fundamental are reasons for treating 'x' to be true. We are not trying to prove the fundamental beliefs, we are giving reasons they should be taken as proven.

Okay. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be saying that our reasons for treating 'x' to be true do not relate in any way to the truth of 'x' (that is, they are pragmatic reasons). Presumably, then, these reasons must unfold as a result of some prior goal that you want to accomplish. What is this goal?

Is it merely to avoid skepticism? If so, then once you realize that your reasons are not related to the truth of 'x' in any way, have you really avoided skepticism, or have you simply shut your eyes to it (and taken a position on faith, comparable to religious faith)?

Now, if you're a true pragmatist, this argument won't particularly trouble you. Then again, if you're a true pragmatist, it's hard to imagine why you would object to all religious faith in principle, rather than simply objecting to the dangerous and fanatical factions of religious faith (like Islamic extremists). After all, religious faith often does good things for people, and in those circumstances a pragmatist would presumably (unless he had some arbitrary and personal internal need to do otherwise) encourage faith to blossom.

A pragmatist also wouldn't say things like "Throwing out rational or observational belief structures means you have to find a valid system, it doesn't mean you can just make stuff up or believe what makes you happy". The whole point of pragmatism is that you're basically constructing reality anyway ("making stuff up") and as long as it works ("makes you happy") go for it.

So you are presumably not a pragmatist. You seem to want some kind of normative foundation that provides you with access to truth. Which brings us back to where we started, and to your distinction between "believing" and "treating" a proposition as true. If I'm understanding you, then what you're proposing doesn't seem to get you what you want (because the difference between "believing" and "treating" seems to be precisely that "treating" something as true doesn't require a normative foundation for believing that it is true). But perhaps I don't understand the distinction you're drawing yet.
posted by gd779 at 11:09 PM on March 19, 2005

You are all wrong!
posted by TwelveTwo at 1:37 AM on March 20, 2005

The thing i'm most afraid of is being sucked into a creepy crazy cult!

(/sarcastic tinfoil)
posted by schyler523 at 2:06 AM on March 20, 2005

Is it merely to avoid skepticism?

The goal of the foundational beliefs is to create a belief system which is accurate, rational, and useful. Any belief system we construct is obviously going to be based on observation and reason; we have nothing else to base it on aside from random guessing. To ground out our beliefs, we merely make the reasonable assumption that observation and reason are trustworthy. Certainly, they seem to be, and if they are not, then forming a valid belief system is impossible anyway.

If so, then once you realize that your reasons are not related to the truth of 'x' in any way, have you really avoided skepticism, or have you simply shut your eyes to it (and taken a position on faith, comparable to religious faith)?

Well, skepticism is pretty much impossible to avoid completely, because there is always the possibility of being under a deception which is completely indistinguishable from reality. But it does avoid it significantly, because the fundamental beliefs are things that, if false, would render the world completely incomprehensible. So essentially, either the fundamental beliefs are accurate, and a belief structure grounded out in them is accurate, or they are wrong and an accurate belief structure is impossible anyway.

Also, fundamental beliefs do justify one another to some degree, and are justified from higher levels; the philosophy is coherent. These justifications are not why the fundamental beliefs are treated as proven, but they do increase our confidence in them.

This philosophy does have something in common with contextualism; it ignores the brain in the vat scenario, etc. in common practice, but skepticism is not totally discarded as a possibility. One can treat the knowledge that comes out of the philosophy as being conditional; it allows you to know something, assuming the foundational beliefs are true. Since one assumes them to be true nearly all the time, these assumptions are fine, unless one is actively considering the possibility that they are false.

A pragmatist also wouldn't say things like "Throwing out rational or observational belief structures means you have to find a valid system, it doesn't mean you can just make stuff up or believe what makes you happy". The whole point of pragmatism is that you're basically constructing reality anyway ("making stuff up") and as long as it works ("makes you happy") go for it.

So you are presumably not a pragmatist. You seem to want some kind of normative foundation that provides you with access to truth. Which brings us back to where we started, and to your distinction between "believing" and "treating" a proposition as true. If I'm understanding you, then what you're proposing doesn't seem to get you what you want (because the difference between "believing" and "treating" seems to be precisely that "treating" something as true doesn't require a normative foundation for believing that it is true). But perhaps I don't understand the distinction you're drawing yet.

I'm not a pragmatist, but rather a pragmatic idealist. I understand that the absolute truth is almost certainly unknowable, but I do want the best approximation of truth that can be found with regard to the external world. These foundational beliefs are the best approximatory method to determining knowledge I am aware of.

I actually consider pragmatic belief systems such as you describe to be completely unethical. When you allow your belief system to either have false or unnecessary assumptions, or it is incoherent, your beliefs become more and more inaccurate. Because your actions are reliant on both your beliefs and your intentions, having false beliefs will cause you to take actions to harm others, even if you believe you are doing good. For that reason, every person has a responsibility to keep their belief systems in order and assure they are fully coherent, in line with all observations, and contain no unnecessary or incorrect assumptions. Acting without this kind of intellectual integrity is almost certain to cause harm in the long term, even if all you attempt is good.
posted by Mitrovarr at 3:09 AM on March 20, 2005

I understand that the absolute truth is almost certainly unknowable, but I do want the best approximation of truth that can be found with regard to the external world.

Okay. Sounds fair enough, but let's examine it. You judge an idea to be an "approximation of truth" (acknowledge that certain truth is unknowable) if:

every person has a responsibility to keep their belief systems in order and assure they are fully coherent

Check. Makes sense. You're just asking people to agree with themselves.

in line with all observations

Check. Makes sense. You're just asking people to remain consistent with the observable world. (You're limiting yourself to empiricism, but I'll grant that for the moment).

and contain no unnecessary or incorrect assumptions.

Whoah. Here's where you go off the rational rails. We'll set aside for a moment whether a system with a fewer number (rather than simpler or more reasonable) assumptions is actually better. Fundamentally, the rule about minimizing the number of assumptions you use to explain observation is designed for the practicing scientist - that is, it doesn't make thisexplanation obviously better, it just makes it easier for the explanation that comes from the next experiment to cohere. But most people are not practicing scientists. So how do you justify imposing this requirement on them? And how do you defeat Quine's argument that this "dogma" is completely unfounded, logically speaking?

Because your actions are reliant on both your beliefs and your intentions, having false beliefs will cause you to take actions to harm others, even if you believe you are doing good.

That would be true, if we had access to truth. But, in your view, we only have access to an approximation of the truth. And sometimes those approximatioins will be bad.

Early medical science followed all of your rules for determining truth. But up until like the early 1980's, if you were sick, you would have been statistically better off staying away from a doctor. Their approximations of truth were so bad that they were more likely to harm you than cure you.

So it's not always clear that our (bad) approximations of the truth will do less harm than a good and helpful lie. In those circumstances, would you grant that it is better for a person (not a practicing scientist) to have a false belief that does good, rather than a more true belief that does harm? Can you grant that in principle, even if not in fact?

Any belief system we construct is obviously going to be based on observation and reason; we have nothing else to base it on aside from random guessing.

Why is intuition ruled out of the equation a priori? To some people, the knowledge that "God loves me" feels every bit as real as the knowledge that it is a warm day. And the belief in God's love can be squared with experience easily enough. Is it an "unnecessary assumption" rather than an observation? If so, why?

Why is rationalism ruled out a priori? A lot of our greatest thinkers, from Descartes on down, have believed that truth can be known intuitively through reason. Why are you rejecting their claims out of hand?

I could go on, but I'm sure you see the point well enough to explain your reasoning on this point, if you wish to.
posted by gd779 at 6:47 AM on March 20, 2005

Urban Hermit:

...whether it is more realistic to view irrationality as a "pollution" of human nature and human society, or as an inherent characteristic of them

Well, I think that's a false dilemma. I regard it as both. Bad things can be inherent characteristics of other things.

- a characteristic that, in our prudence, we should attempt to account for, but one that we only attempt to eradicate at our great peril.

I'm not sure I see why it must be perilous to try to eradicate bad things. And if it is perilous, I don't see why that should stop us attempting to do it all the same; especially when the existing perils caused by those bad things are huge. Human progress has always been fraught with peril. I admire those who were courageous enough not to be daunted by this. Some things are worth a bit of peril, I think.

This, as I've tried to argue above, might be to badly misconstrue the nature of the religious impulse in man.

I don't think many of us who are strongly anti-religious are under any illusions about how powerful the religious impulse is, or how widespread its influence. That's precisely why we choose to resist it strongly rather than to seek accommodation with it. If we thought this stuff was weak, or trivial, or localised, we'd give it no more attention than we give to belief in alien abduction or palmistry. I don't think that it's any coincidence that the path of excessive tolerance towards the irrational has led us to a place where religious extremism and other forms of unreason have thrived.

Is it merely this, or does religion in fact exist at a "higher quantum level" of epistemology - i.e., it does not have for believers the status of a mere "opinion" that can either be validated by objective evidence, or not. It exists, for them, beyond the realm in which reason and observation can confirm or not confirm opinions and hypotheses.

Well, this sounds like a fancy way of presenting what is, at root, the fallacy of "argument from personal conviction". That doesn't fly in debate and I don't think it should fly outside of it either. I'm in no doubt that the religious often regard their particular belief as being of a superior nature when compared with other beliefs. Certain political extremists feel this way too. And others. But the fact that they feel that way is no argument at all in favour of their beliefs actually being of a superior or special nature, or, therefore, for treating them that way.


It seems unproductive, therefore, and perhaps a bit ignorant, to confront believers with supposed "horseshit" like inconsistencies and controversies in their conflicting sacred texts.

Unproductive in terms of persuading them, perhaps. But by confronting them we keep the rational position in view, where others can see it. Ignorant? No, I disagree there. It is no more ignorant to present an anti-religious argument than it is to present a pro-religious one. So long as the religious are pushing their ideas in public I believe the opposing ideas should be pushed right back. Quid pro quo. Balance. The religious, of course, frequently try to stifle such opposition (blasphemy laws, the recent "religious hatred" bill in the UK, etc) because it very much suits them to do so. It's worth noting that most anti-religious people only seek the right to attack manifestations of religious belief: we do not seek to suppress them.
posted by Decani at 7:13 AM on March 20, 2005

gd779, you're not distinguishing between beliefs which allow us to make use of the data we receive, and beliefs which are superfluous to the data we receive.

Reason is the organization of the data, so in order to be rational, we must allow for certain 'conditions for the possibility', basically. Accepting that the incoming perceptions etc are worth organizing and making sense of is what reason is; as you say it involves setting aside some doubts.

But this is different from belief in god or an afterlife, because we do not receive any direct data about those things, and we do not have to set aside doubts about them in order to interact with the world meaningfully.
posted by mdn at 7:24 AM on March 20, 2005

this is different from belief in god or an afterlife, because we do not receive any direct data about those things

Well, you may not receive any direct data about those things, but some people do. There's a couple of schools of thought here.

First, some people believe that they can know that murder is "wrong", even though I can't touch or see or taste wrongness. If you believe that, then the case is easy: it's impossible to distinguish intuitive moral knowledge from intuitive spiritual knowledge regarding God's love. You can accept one or neither, but there is no good reason to pick and choose.

Say, however, that you reject the idea that moral concepts exist, because you can't pin them down and define them. Fine, you're still left with the fact that some people do have certain intuitive knowledge of God's love. On close examination, this belief turns out to be rationally indistinguishable from any number of beliefs you probably hold without adequate support. So you're left, again, with the question of why you're ruling intuitive knowledge out a priori, rather than simply accepting them as valid evidence and then testing them against the rest of observed experience.

Say, however, that you are adamant in your (at this point, still unjustified) refusal to consider intuitive knowledge. You're still left with a variety of historical facts -- from the improbability that Jesus's disciples would choose to die for a lie to the impression of design in nature -- that can, to a reasonable mind, indicate truth, or at least be squared with experience. That's the key point: even if you yourself are not persuaded by these arguments (as I am not, by the way) you must recognize that they can be made perfectly coherent and consistent with observed experience; as a result, they are rational.

So there are a variety of ways in which reasonable minds can find direct evidence for some sort of religious belief. Indeed, the most brilliant minds in history, from Pascal on down, have in fact done so. I'm not quite willing to dismiss all of these thinkers as wholly irrational.

we do not have to set aside doubts about them in order to interact with the world meaningfully.

I'm not entirely sure I understand your point here. But if I do understand what you mean, then my answer would be: you do, at least arguably.

If materialism/evolution/secularism is true, then the mind is the product of random chance. There is, a priori, no reason to believe that a product of random chance would function reliably or consistently to produce true beliefs. As a result, our beliefs about, say, evolution cannot be entirely trusted, because who is to say that our minds were functioning properly when we decided to believe that? If the mind plays tricks on us, what can we trust? And if the mind is not designed, we have no a priori reason to believe that it won't play tricks on us, and no other faculty with which to verify that it is not playing tricks on us right this moment.

Assume, on the other hand, that God exists and created man for a variety of purposes that require an ability to reliably and consistently apprehend the truth of reality. Under this assumption, you are warrented (a priori) in trusting that your beliefs are true and well-formed.

So it appears that you might have to set aside some doubts about religion (and atheism) in order to interact with the world meaningfully. If you doubt that religion is true, you run into philosophical problems regarding your ability to formulate true belief.
posted by gd779 at 7:45 AM on March 20, 2005

Decani: "It's worth noting that most anti-religious people only seek the right to attack manifestations of religious belief: we do not seek to suppress them."

When I invoke the Soviet Union, it's not to show that atheists are more oppressive than religious people; it's only to show that the modern notion that atheists can't be just as oppressive is pure bunk.
posted by koeselitz at 8:12 AM on March 20, 2005

koeselitz: the problem with invoking the Soviet Union as a representation of "what atheists can do" is that it was the political beliefs of the Soviets (i.e. communism) that primarily drove their behaviour, not atheism. It was largely what they believed in that led to intolerance and brutality. Communism was not driven by atheism, and neither were its worst excesses. When people single out Soviet atheism as a primary factor in Soviet behaviour it smacks of desperation.
posted by Decani at 10:13 AM on March 20, 2005

gd779: "intuitive knowledge" is a contradiction in terms. Intuition is not knowledge. It's a guess. It may later turn out to be a correct guess, but it does not become knowledge until the guess is verified by rational, demonstrable, repeatable means.
posted by Decani at 10:15 AM on March 20, 2005

"intuitive knowledge" is a contradiction in terms. Intuition is not knowledge.

Decani: Well, many if not most of the greatest thinkers throughout history (especially Goedel, as noted) would disagree with you. But we'll set that aside, and examine your assertion (which is bald and unsupported, I note) on it's merits.

An honest, rational individual should consider all the evidence at his or her disposal when trying to determine the truth, don't you think?

When you see a chair in the room, what do you know? You know that you "see" a chair. Does that mean that the chair is actually there? Not necessarily. You could be drunk, or on drugs. You might be dreaming. Etc.

When you intuitively sense that murder is "wrong" or that "God loves me", what do you know? You know that you feel an intuition. Does that mean that "wrong" and God actually exist. Not necessarily.

But it is a data point. It is evidence of something.

What you are doing is refusing to even consider all the evidence; you are excluding a class of data out of bounds a priori. And you are making this exclusion on no basis (that I can see) whatsoever. Which is a very strange thing for a "rational" empiricist to do, don't you think?
posted by gd779 at 10:31 AM on March 20, 2005

Decani: No, I'm just dumb. I see your basis for refusing to even consider intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge is not "rational, demonstrable, repeatable."

Let's examine that. What do you mean by "rational"? I have no idea. I suspect this is just rhetoric, designed to paint your opponents as "irrational" and therefore (by implication) not even worth listening to. We'll set this criteria aside.

Demonstrable. Well, in one sense I can demonstrate my knowledge: I can report it and see if other people agree. And, in point of fact, if you were to poll every human being throughout the ages on the existence of God, you'd get an overwhelming verdict in favor of God's existence. But perhaps we are more enlightened today, with more knowledge: Poll everyone alive at this very moment. You'll still get an overwhelming verdict in favor of God's existence.

(It's true the verdict won't be unanimous, but then try polling everyone on the existence of the color blue: some people just can't see it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.)

Ah, you might retort, but it is only here in the enlightened West that we have access to The Truth - everyone else is trapped in superstition and ignorance. Their beliefs are inferior. Fine, we'll poll everyone in the country. Still an overwhelming verdict in favor of God's existance, mostly on an intuitive basis.

So, at bottom, what you're saying is that the intutive existence of God doesn't cohere with the ways of reasoning deployed by you and the sort of people you usually like to talk to. That is a very modest claim. Have you any more rational basis for your argument?

Here I echo Stanley Fish:

A difference of opinion you respect is an opinion held by someone who argues from the same premises and with the same tools you do; an opinion you merely tolerate - although we won't imprison you for holding it, neither will we take any account of it in the process of formulating policy - is an opinion held by someone who argues from premises and with tools you and your friends find provincial at best and dangerous (because fanatical) at worst. It is at this point that you dismiss those premises (such as biblical inerrancy) as ones no rational person could subscribe to, whereas in fact what you have done is define "rational" so as to make it congruent with the ways of thinking you and those who agree with you customarily deploy. "Mutual respect" should be renamed "mutual self-congratulation" since it will not be extended beyond the circle of those who already feel comfortable with one another.

-- Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle, pg. 199 - 200.

Which brings us, finally, to your final criterion: "repeatable". As I mentioned earlier, this is a pragmatic consideration that bears no relationship whatsoever to the truth of a given proposition, but is instead designed to help practicing scientists keep their models at a workable level of simplicity over time. I see, and you have provided, no compelling reason to believe that this requirement should be imported to every day life.

I especially see no reason to adopt your criterion in circumstances where such a belief would be harmful to the interests of the person doing the believing. Many people get a great deal of utility out of their belief in the existence of God, and since that belief is - strictly speaking - perfectly rational, and therefore perfectly indistinguishable on rational grounds from the scientism you seem to worship, I see no reason to tell them they shouldn't believe their intuitions.

Do you?
posted by gd779 at 10:48 AM on March 20, 2005

we're very puzzled (even angry) when other people feel rationally justified in contradictory beliefs. The answer to this puzzle is not that "if everyone were just as rational as I am, we'd all have The Truth". The answer is that we're not being rational either - we can't be that rational, because reason just doesn't have those kinds of answers to give.

First, you have to separate the "we" into singular entities, and then individual reasoning gives coherence to the individual actions in retrospect. The notion that a set of reasoning or beliefs can serve a crowd of separate individuals is when untanable characterizations develop.
posted by semmi at 10:55 AM on March 20, 2005

Communism was not driven by atheism, and neither were its worst excesses. When people single out Soviet atheism as a primary factor in Soviet behaviour it smacks of desperation

The point is that its official atheism didn't save it from being a big jerk.

If officially atheist regimes can do horrible things, and regimes with a rigidly enforced official religion can do horrible things, and regimes with an unenforced official religion can be horrible, and regimes with no official religion can do horrible things, then odds are that doing horrible things doesn't have much to do with religiosity one way or the other.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:11 AM on March 20, 2005