I have started writing a comment multiple times, only to remove what I wrote mid-sentence. I think I figured out why that is: your post is tempting us to argue against the existence of experiences that cannot be communicated (do you mean: ‘not perfectly communicated’ or ‘not even hinted at that they exist’? Communication is not binary), and with the sentences:
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic.
you attempt to ban a whole class of arguments that might well be relevant. Your post is a wonderful piece of rhetoric (although some of the analogies get stretched a bit thin), but it hardly communicates anything. Other than
people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences
there doesn’t seem to be a single claim in the whole text. Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?
Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?
That’s a little bit of an oversimplified caricature, but yes, I do more or less believe that this is true. Moreover, I think there is evidence to support this position beyond just the intuitive argument I’ve presented here. The idea that religion evolved as a way of maintaining social cohesion is hardly original with me. I’m frankly a little bit surprised that I’m getting pushback on this; I had assumed this was common knowledge.
The strong part of the claim is not “There exists a feeling of belonging, and religion is particularly good at inducing it” or even “Religion is among the best if not outright the very best method for maintaining social cohesion”, which as you say are not claims that I think would recieve a lot of pushback (here, at least). The strong part is “Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging”—i.e. when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?
I would accept that most of the modern function of spirituality today is to provide cohesion, but at the same time spirituality also claims to have insight into some factual matters (history, for example) and moral dilemmas. I don’t see how accepting that these insights were generated with the purpose/function of maintaining group cohesion is correlated at all with them being true. I think this is the core conflict of Spirituality vs Rationality, the title of the post; not that maintaining group cohesion is irrational, but that accepting answers to factual and sometimes moral questions through dogma instead of evidence cannot be reconciled with rationality.
If there was a spirituality where all the participants acknowledged that the main purpose is group cohesion, all spoken and written text is to be interpreted as metaphors at best and, say, regular church-going makes everybody more happy all around, then I think most rationalists would be all for that. But this doesnt look at all like the spirituality found in the world around us.
when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?
I have no idea. Things were so vastly different back then I can’t possibly even mount an educated guess about that. What difference does it make how it started? Today, at least in the U.S., I think it’s a defensibly hypothesis that what people call “spiritual experiences” are largely about community and shared subjective experience.
spirituality also claims to have insight into some factual matters (history, for example) and moral dilemmas.
Sure, but that’s not the subject I’m addressing. The subject I’m addressing is the belief that many people in the rational community seem to hold (Dawkins being the most prominent example) that the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot.
this doesnt look at all like the spirituality found in the world around us.
Yes, that’s mostly true (though I am personally acquainted with a number of people who profess to believe in God but who are otherwise seem perfectly rational). I’m not saying that the conclusions reached by religious people are correct. I’m simply advancing the hypothesis that religious people reach the conclusions that they do is in part that they have different subjective experiences than non-relgious people.
Dawkins being the most prominent example [...] the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot.
Why do people feel free to write such rot about Richard Dawkins? In his book “The God Delusion” he says: “Great scientists who profess religion become harder to find through the twentieth century, but they are not particularly rare.” Do you think that is consistent with thinking that the only possible reason for professing belief in God is idiocy?
Well, OK, Dawkins doesn’t use the word “idiot.” He says that anyone who believes in God is suffering from “a pernicious delusion” (The God Delusion, Chapter 2). I think most people would say that distinguishing between idiocy and pernicious delusions is splitting a pretty fine hair. But be that as it may, the point is: Dawkins has absolutely no sympathy for religious belief of any kind for any reason. Or at least he didn’t in 2006. Maybe he’s mellowed since then. (But I met him in 2012 in a social setting and he told me, apropos of nothing, “I despise religion.”)
most people would say that distinguishing between idiocy and pernicious delusions is splitting a pretty fine hair
I think there’s a big difference. “Because they are an idiot” is saying something wide-ranging about that person’s nature: they’re just Not Very Bright. If someone is an idiot, we can expect them to be generally intellectually incompetent. “suffering from a pernicious delusion” is saying something much narrower about one area of their life: they are wrong about this one thing. If someone has a pernicious delusion, we can expect them to make serious errors about things closely related to that delusion, but aside from that they might be wise and ingenious and quick-witted and so forth. Pointing out the difference between these is not hair-splitting.
no sympathy for religious belief
That may be true (though so far as I can see the thing you link to doesn’t show that it is). But so what?
You cited Dawkins as an example of someone who believes the proposition you were arguing against: “that the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot”. I don’t think he believes this. I know I don’t believe this. I really don’t think there are many rationalists who believe it.
Now, maybe what you’re actually arguing against is something broader—e.g., that we shouldn’t say unpleasant things about religion, or that we shouldn’t hold any negative opinion about religious people that goes beyond “they are probably wrong on such-and-such factual questions”. But so far as I can see the arguments you’ve been making aren’t of the right form to lead to such conclusions, even were they correct in every detail.
Of course it’s possible. That’s not the point. The point is that “pernicious delusion” is pejorative in much the same way that “idiot” is (which is why I extrapolated it that way). Both imply some sort of mental deficiency or disorder. If someone believes in God, on this view, it can only be because their brains are broken.
To be sure, some people do have broken brains, and some people believe in God as a result. The hypothesis that I’m advancing here is that some people may believe in God not because their brains are broken, but because they have had (real) subjective experiences that non-believers generally have not had.
Could you taboo ‘are [...] about’ in your “what people call “spiritual experiences” are largely about community and shared subjective experience.”?
Also your main point, that religious people reach their conclusions partly because they have experienced different things than non-religious people, is simply true. But why would you write a long metaphor-riddled piece about this, and give it the clickbait title “Is Spirituality Irrational?”. And even with this formulation there is still some Motte-and-Bailey going on if you intend to reconcile spirituality and rationality—just because different experiences were a contributing factor to accepting spirituality does not strongly support that spirituality and rationality can go hand-in-hand. Most importantly your final claim doesn’t seem to help in answering my ‘core conflict’ above.
But why would you write a long metaphor-riddled piece about this,
Because not everyone believes it to be true. And because metaphor can be an effective rhetorical device for some audiences.
and give it the clickbait title “Is Spirituality Irrational?”
Because it was written in response to an article entitled “Religious and Rational?”
Most importantly your final claim doesn’t seem to help in answering my ‘core conflict’ above.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as my “final claim.” But my intent here is not to reconcile religion and rationality; that can’t be done. My intent here is just to try to provide an alternative explanation of how people arrive at religious conclusions than the “they are all idiots” hypothesis, with the hope that this might lead to more constructive dialog.
Ah, I see. OK, well, let me begin by re-stating my original disclaimer that I actually have no idea what the answer to the question is, and that this is pure speculation on my part. But with that firmly in mind, here’s my best shot at re-forumulation that speculation under this taboo.
Let’s recall the original question:
when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?
I don’t think this is an exhaustive enumeration of the possibilities. My guess (and I cannot emphasize that enough) is that they were (and remain) attempts to make sense of subjective experiences that many people actually do experience. In that sense they were more “claims of truth” than “persuasion tricks”.
However...
There is some evidence (I don’t have the references handy but I can probably find them if you really want to know) that the ancients view of truth and falsehood was very different from the modern conception. The ancients had at least three categories of “truth”, what we moderns would roughly call “objective physical truth”, “fiction or falsehood”, and “myth.” The ancients believed that a claim like, “And God said...” was of a very different nature than a claim like, “Achmed ate an apple yesterday.” Part of the problem with modern thought—and one of the reasons that it seems to lead to so many intractable arguments—is that we insist on getting rid of the “myth” category and lumping all claims into two buckets: objectively true or objectively false.
It is easy to see that this is problematic in other regimes, like artistic beauty. Most moderns readily recognize that it makes no sense to try to categorize a claim like, “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is a beautiful painting” into “objectively true” or “objectively false.” (Note, however, that David Deutsch actually disputes this!) The ancients would have considered an attempt to categorize “the law was given by the gods” as “objectively true” or “objectively false” to be equally futile.
Moreover, I think there is evidence to support this position beyond just the intuitive argument I’ve presented here. The idea that religion evolved as a way of maintaining social cohesion is hardly original with me.
What has social cohesion to do with spirituality? Why do you consider those to be linked? You don’t explain that at all in your post.
That’s true, sorry about that. I actually wrote this piece many months ago, and it’s a topic on which I have written extensively elsewhere. I’ve made the social-cohesion argument elsewhere, and I just forgot that I hadn’t made it here. But here is the argument in a nutshell: we are social creatures, and many (if not all) of our social interactions are fundamentally based on shared subjective experiences: sharing the same meal, watching the same sunset, understanding the same proof. The religious trappings that tend to surround spirituality—the holy texts and the prayers and the rituals—can be understood as attempts to create social interactions anchored by the kinds of euphoric experiences I describe in my piece, the kind of experience that is hard to render into words beyond something like “Feeling the presence of the holy spirit” or something like that. It’s the difference between looking at the grooves (which is what rational people tend to do when the look at religion), and listening to the music (spiritual experience), and going to a concert and getting carried around in the mosh pit (going to church).
It’s the difference between looking at the grooves (which is what rational people tend to do when the look at religion)
It seems that you refer with the term rational to new atheist or something in that direction but not necessarily with what this community means with the term.
That’s quite possible. If I used the term inappropriately, I apologize. So I’ll re-phrase: “which is what a certain sub-set of non-religious people tend to do when they look at religion”.
I have started writing a comment multiple times, only to remove what I wrote mid-sentence. I think I figured out why that is: your post is tempting us to argue against the existence of experiences that cannot be communicated (do you mean: ‘not perfectly communicated’ or ‘not even hinted at that they exist’? Communication is not binary), and with the sentences:
you attempt to ban a whole class of arguments that might well be relevant. Your post is a wonderful piece of rhetoric (although some of the analogies get stretched a bit thin), but it hardly communicates anything. Other than
there doesn’t seem to be a single claim in the whole text. Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?
That’s a little bit of an oversimplified caricature, but yes, I do more or less believe that this is true. Moreover, I think there is evidence to support this position beyond just the intuitive argument I’ve presented here. The idea that religion evolved as a way of maintaining social cohesion is hardly original with me. I’m frankly a little bit surprised that I’m getting pushback on this; I had assumed this was common knowledge.
The strong part of the claim is not “There exists a feeling of belonging, and religion is particularly good at inducing it” or even “Religion is among the best if not outright the very best method for maintaining social cohesion”, which as you say are not claims that I think would recieve a lot of pushback (here, at least). The strong part is “Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging”—i.e. when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?
I would accept that most of the modern function of spirituality today is to provide cohesion, but at the same time spirituality also claims to have insight into some factual matters (history, for example) and moral dilemmas. I don’t see how accepting that these insights were generated with the purpose/function of maintaining group cohesion is correlated at all with them being true. I think this is the core conflict of Spirituality vs Rationality, the title of the post; not that maintaining group cohesion is irrational, but that accepting answers to factual and sometimes moral questions through dogma instead of evidence cannot be reconciled with rationality.
If there was a spirituality where all the participants acknowledged that the main purpose is group cohesion, all spoken and written text is to be interpreted as metaphors at best and, say, regular church-going makes everybody more happy all around, then I think most rationalists would be all for that. But this doesnt look at all like the spirituality found in the world around us.
I have no idea. Things were so vastly different back then I can’t possibly even mount an educated guess about that. What difference does it make how it started? Today, at least in the U.S., I think it’s a defensibly hypothesis that what people call “spiritual experiences” are largely about community and shared subjective experience.
Sure, but that’s not the subject I’m addressing. The subject I’m addressing is the belief that many people in the rational community seem to hold (Dawkins being the most prominent example) that the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot.
Yes, that’s mostly true (though I am personally acquainted with a number of people who profess to believe in God but who are otherwise seem perfectly rational). I’m not saying that the conclusions reached by religious people are correct. I’m simply advancing the hypothesis that religious people reach the conclusions that they do is in part that they have different subjective experiences than non-relgious people.
Why do people feel free to write such rot about Richard Dawkins? In his book “The God Delusion” he says: “Great scientists who profess religion become harder to find through the twentieth century, but they are not particularly rare.” Do you think that is consistent with thinking that the only possible reason for professing belief in God is idiocy?
Well, OK, Dawkins doesn’t use the word “idiot.” He says that anyone who believes in God is suffering from “a pernicious delusion” (The God Delusion, Chapter 2). I think most people would say that distinguishing between idiocy and pernicious delusions is splitting a pretty fine hair. But be that as it may, the point is: Dawkins has absolutely no sympathy for religious belief of any kind for any reason. Or at least he didn’t in 2006. Maybe he’s mellowed since then. (But I met him in 2012 in a social setting and he told me, apropos of nothing, “I despise religion.”)
I think there’s a big difference. “Because they are an idiot” is saying something wide-ranging about that person’s nature: they’re just Not Very Bright. If someone is an idiot, we can expect them to be generally intellectually incompetent. “suffering from a pernicious delusion” is saying something much narrower about one area of their life: they are wrong about this one thing. If someone has a pernicious delusion, we can expect them to make serious errors about things closely related to that delusion, but aside from that they might be wise and ingenious and quick-witted and so forth. Pointing out the difference between these is not hair-splitting.
That may be true (though so far as I can see the thing you link to doesn’t show that it is). But so what?
You cited Dawkins as an example of someone who believes the proposition you were arguing against: “that the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot”. I don’t think he believes this. I know I don’t believe this. I really don’t think there are many rationalists who believe it.
Now, maybe what you’re actually arguing against is something broader—e.g., that we shouldn’t say unpleasant things about religion, or that we shouldn’t hold any negative opinion about religious people that goes beyond “they are probably wrong on such-and-such factual questions”. But so far as I can see the arguments you’ve been making aren’t of the right form to lead to such conclusions, even were they correct in every detail.
It is possible to be extremely intelligent, and suffer from a delusion.
Of course it’s possible. That’s not the point. The point is that “pernicious delusion” is pejorative in much the same way that “idiot” is (which is why I extrapolated it that way). Both imply some sort of mental deficiency or disorder. If someone believes in God, on this view, it can only be because their brains are broken.
To be sure, some people do have broken brains, and some people believe in God as a result. The hypothesis that I’m advancing here is that some people may believe in God not because their brains are broken, but because they have had (real) subjective experiences that non-believers generally have not had.
I am tapping out of this thread.
Could you taboo ‘are [...] about’ in your “what people call “spiritual experiences” are largely about community and shared subjective experience.”?
Also your main point, that religious people reach their conclusions partly because they have experienced different things than non-religious people, is simply true. But why would you write a long metaphor-riddled piece about this, and give it the clickbait title “Is Spirituality Irrational?”. And even with this formulation there is still some Motte-and-Bailey going on if you intend to reconcile spirituality and rationality—just because different experiences were a contributing factor to accepting spirituality does not strongly support that spirituality and rationality can go hand-in-hand. Most importantly your final claim doesn’t seem to help in answering my ‘core conflict’ above.
Sorry, that didn’t parse.
Because not everyone believes it to be true. And because metaphor can be an effective rhetorical device for some audiences.
Because it was written in response to an article entitled “Religious and Rational?”
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as my “final claim.” But my intent here is not to reconcile religion and rationality; that can’t be done. My intent here is just to try to provide an alternative explanation of how people arrive at religious conclusions than the “they are all idiots” hypothesis, with the hope that this might lead to more constructive dialog.
Taboo Your Words should provide the necessary context to parse TheMajor’s query.
I think.
Ah, I see. OK, well, let me begin by re-stating my original disclaimer that I actually have no idea what the answer to the question is, and that this is pure speculation on my part. But with that firmly in mind, here’s my best shot at re-forumulation that speculation under this taboo.
Let’s recall the original question:
I don’t think this is an exhaustive enumeration of the possibilities. My guess (and I cannot emphasize that enough) is that they were (and remain) attempts to make sense of subjective experiences that many people actually do experience. In that sense they were more “claims of truth” than “persuasion tricks”.
However...
There is some evidence (I don’t have the references handy but I can probably find them if you really want to know) that the ancients view of truth and falsehood was very different from the modern conception. The ancients had at least three categories of “truth”, what we moderns would roughly call “objective physical truth”, “fiction or falsehood”, and “myth.” The ancients believed that a claim like, “And God said...” was of a very different nature than a claim like, “Achmed ate an apple yesterday.” Part of the problem with modern thought—and one of the reasons that it seems to lead to so many intractable arguments—is that we insist on getting rid of the “myth” category and lumping all claims into two buckets: objectively true or objectively false.
It is easy to see that this is problematic in other regimes, like artistic beauty. Most moderns readily recognize that it makes no sense to try to categorize a claim like, “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is a beautiful painting” into “objectively true” or “objectively false.” (Note, however, that David Deutsch actually disputes this!) The ancients would have considered an attempt to categorize “the law was given by the gods” as “objectively true” or “objectively false” to be equally futile.
What has social cohesion to do with spirituality? Why do you consider those to be linked? You don’t explain that at all in your post.
That’s true, sorry about that. I actually wrote this piece many months ago, and it’s a topic on which I have written extensively elsewhere. I’ve made the social-cohesion argument elsewhere, and I just forgot that I hadn’t made it here. But here is the argument in a nutshell: we are social creatures, and many (if not all) of our social interactions are fundamentally based on shared subjective experiences: sharing the same meal, watching the same sunset, understanding the same proof. The religious trappings that tend to surround spirituality—the holy texts and the prayers and the rituals—can be understood as attempts to create social interactions anchored by the kinds of euphoric experiences I describe in my piece, the kind of experience that is hard to render into words beyond something like “Feeling the presence of the holy spirit” or something like that. It’s the difference between looking at the grooves (which is what rational people tend to do when the look at religion), and listening to the music (spiritual experience), and going to a concert and getting carried around in the mosh pit (going to church).
It seems that you refer with the term rational to
new atheistor something in that direction but not necessarily with what this community means with the term.That’s quite possible. If I used the term inappropriately, I apologize. So I’ll re-phrase: “which is what a certain sub-set of non-religious people tend to do when they look at religion”.