I was going to post the following when it first appeared on Jonathan Derbyshire’s ‘Blog. Norm’s post today reminded me that I hadn’t.
Derbyshire makes a point that even militant atheists should concede:
As Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality, the principle of human equality articulated in the Second Treatise, which he says with good reason is just about the best worked-out "theory of basic equality … we have in the canon of political philosophy", is an axiom of theology. It is, says Waldron, "the most important truth about God’s way with the world in regard to the social and political implications of His creation of the human person". (Nietzsche thought the same, incidentally, which is why he was sceptical of the principle of equality, and of the related notions of pity and compassion.)
Now, of course, the challenge that Locke and Waldron set us is whether secular sense can be made of the principle of equality and of the idea that each human life is inalienably precious … [I]t is simply ahistorical to deny that our (liberal) conceptions of equality and human dignity have Christian antecedents.
And Christianity might have had a thing or two to do with the emergence of proper science as well.
(These kinds of argument are also reminders to believers that there are at least as many species of skeptics as there are Christians. For example, Norm belongs to the United Polite Front Of Atheism; Ophelia Benson and Richard Dawkins do not. But even Dawkins is more polite about fundamentalists than fundamentalists are about everyone who disagrees with them. Norm is also a glass-half-full atheist; my glass is leaking. On average, atheism makes you unhappier than you ought to be and, ironically, (evolutionary) biological science provides some support for this view. I am convinced that humans are wired to believe. Contrary to the popular misquotation, when you stop believing in God you stop believing in all sorts of things. Sometimes I have to make a special effort of concentration just to keep the electrons in my left arm from dematerializing.)
Ahhh – it doesn’t matter that the Chesterton is a misquote – it’s still a damned good line.
Warning: long comment.
You use belief in the wrong sense. The problem with religion isn’t belief, it is faith. Let’s not confuse the two.
A belief is a mind-state, nothing more or less. A fact is a world-state, nothing more, nothing less. Evidence for a belief is something that connects a belief to a fact. That is, if you have evidence for a belief your belief is well-founded. Thus no-one worries about believing that the sun will rise, believing that gravity holds us down, and so on, and no-one discusses them as beliefs, because they are well-founded.
Faith is something different. Faith is a belief coupled with a refusal to obtain evidence. One “just believes”. Indeed, in the extreme, the refusal to obtain evidence, or even the holding of the belief in the face of contrary evidence, is sometimes considered virtuous. It is not.
Belief in God is faith. No one has obtained evidence for his existence, so religion considers evidence unnecessary.
As for the morals that come from religion, well, we have two options. Either the morals (such as equality, which I agree is a Good Thing) in fact come from God, in which case you must a) demonstrate the existence of God for them to be well-founded and b) use an argument-from-authority to claim they are good; or, God does not exist, in which case the morals come from people suffering under a delusion. In this case the quality of the morals needs to be argued about, and they must be justified, independent of the delusions those people suffer under.
Finally, you argue that belief is adaptive in some sense, because we have evolved to have the belief. An adaptive benefit doesn’t follow from the existence of a trait. Sometimes, the trait is a necessary burden that is a consequence of something else that is adaptive. An obvious example of a maladaptive trait is the fact that dolphins breathe air, but live in water. In my opinion (just a belief, I’m afraid) religion is a maladaption, a faulty generalization of agency (that is, the idea that something has an internal purpose) from animals to the natural world. Aristotle (or some other Greek) explained gravity in terms of agency – the rock wants to fall – and God is just the biggest agent you can think of; the prime mover for all the things that were hard for Middle-Eastern tribes to understand.
Belief in God springs directly from our alienation from nature caused by the advent of consciousness and the appearance of the ego. There are other ways to reconnect with the world-sensorium that do not require a chap who runs it from the planet Heaven. TM, for example; vigorous physical exercise; ascetism; living in the moment (a tough proposition).
The San have a saying: “Life is a dream dreaming us”. Perfect.
I’ve always thought there’s a lot in Robert Anton Wilson’s explanation: being primates, we can’t comprehend that anything can work without an alpha male running it all.
That seems like kind of an odd definition of faith to me.
The one I’m more familiar with could probably be stated “Faith is a belief coupled with an inability to obtain evidence.”
I’m sure people of most religions would love to be able to prove in a scientific way that their views are correct. They just haven’t come up with a way to do it yet. On the other side, there’s no real way to disprove most religious beliefs either. The subjects at hand just aren’t really amenable to physical testing.
(I once had a conversation with someone to the effect of “Well, I don’t really have any evidence that Argentina exists…” … But really contemplating the philosophical questions there is a pit I’m not sure I want to jump into…)