Saturday, March 5, 2022
Friday, March 4, 2022
A Pragmatic take on Heaven posted by Garrison Keillor?
Going to Heaven
by Emily Dickinson
Going to heaven!
I don't know when,
Pray do not ask me how,--
Indeed, I'm too astonished
To think of answering you!
Going to heaven!--
How dim it sounds!
And yet it will be done
As sure as flocks go home at night
Unto the shepherd's arm!
Perhaps you're going too!
Who knows?
If you should get there first,
Save just a little place for me
Close to the two I lost!
The smallest "robe" will fit me,
And just a bit of "crown";
For you know we do not mind our dress
When we are going home.
I'm glad I don't believe it,
For it would stop my breath,
And I'd like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
"Going to Heaven" by Emily Dickinson. Public domain.
Thursday, March 3, 2022
MALA
Middle Tennessee State University
College of Liberal Arts
Master of Arts in Liberal Arts
MTSU’s Master of Arts in Liberal Arts is an innovative program allowing students to earn a graduate degree through a course of study built around the subjects that they find most interesting and captivating. Anyone holding a bachelor’s degree can pursue long-held or new passions through a personally customized program developed around individual interests. Lifelong learners, professionals, students returning to school after a break, and recent graduates can find flexibility to fit their educational needs through this unique master’s program. Students attend engaging courses and have opportunities to participate in projects in the region or even enroll in education-abroad courses around the world. Top-quality professors bring varying research and teaching interests to the classroom through inspiring instruction. The M.A. in Liberal Arts allows students to refine skills, expand horizons, learn for the joy of it, and obtain the graduate degree they have always wanted.
Preparation for further graduate study, a new job, pursuits after retirement or lifelong learning
30 hours with full-time and part-time opportunities; evening and online classes available
Specially designed courses taught by some of MTSU’s most engaging professors
Flexible course selection to customize the program around your needs
Options for studying independently with faculty on a particular topic and/or participating in MTSU faculty-led study abroad programs
Customized advising to help you succeed
Interested?
For more information contact:
MALA Program Director, Dr. Janet McCormick, Janet.McCormick@mtsu.eduSUMMER 2022 MALA course offerings:
MALA 6030 (crn 51096) Monsters w/ Joan McRae online A-term 3 weeks 5/18-6/6
MALA 6040 (crn 51271) Health Comm w/ Mary Beth Asbury online A-term 5/26-6/26
MALA 6050 (crn 51937) Rationality w/ Phil Oliver web assist Tuesdays 5:15-8:15 in JUB 202 B-term 6 weeks 6/29-8/7
MALA 6040 (crn 50467) the Medieval Book w/ Laura Cochrane web assist MWF 5-7:30 in Todd 339 B-term 3 weeks 7/18-8/7
FALL 2022 MALA course offerings:
MALA 6000 (crn 83559) Foundations in Liberal Arts I Thursday evenings 5:15-8:15
MALA 6010 (crn 83561) Foundations in Liberal Arts II Thursday evenings 6-9
MALA 6040 (crn 84555) Rhetoric and Race w/ Roberta Chevrette Tuesday evenings 6-9
MALA 6030 (crn 86294) Oral History Methods w/ Louis Kyriakoudes Monday evenings 6-9
You could also do study abroad (MALA 6060) or independent study (MALA 6070), work on your thesis (MALA 6640) or Capstone project (MALA 6020) or work on any number of electives across the College of Liberal Arts (up to 6 hours can actually be from outside the CLA if needed).
Email me for more info and to request permits to register (janet.mccormick@mtsu.edu).
Dr. M
==
Submit! (to CLA Scholars Day)
A note from our department chair:
please encourage your best students to submit.
From: Meredith Dye <Meredith.Dye@mtsu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 9:29 AM
To: Mary Magada-Ward <Mary.Magada-Ward@mtsu.edu>
Subject: RE: scholars week
Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 9:29 AM
To: Mary Magada-Ward <Mary.Magada-Ward@mtsu.edu>
Subject: RE: scholars week
Abstracts are due Friday, March 4th. I will accept them late if you need more time. The submission form is on the CLA website. https://www.mtsu.edu/
I plan to have the program together by March 14th so that I can notify everyone who is presenting. March 23rd is CLA Scholar’s Day.
A tale of two Garys (and Philip Kitcher, and Emily Dickinson)
Today's poem, from Emily, is pretty direct. It opens with an apparent declaration that turns out to be misdirection. Going to Heaven! But then, in the last stanza, I'm glad I don't believe it...
For it would stop my breath,
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
She's earthbound and proud of it. So are the loved ones who've gone on before her earthbound, literally. Tucked under. Sown in leaves of grass, as the other great gray poet of demos put it.
But she's also glad, for the sake of their temporal happiness, that they did believe they'd be going up and out on wings of angels... (continues)
==In Memoriam: Gary Gutting. Professor Gutting died on Friday at the age of 76. He was a beloved philosopher and educator — an emeritus professor at Notre Dame, an editor, along with his wife, Anastasia Friel Gutting, known as Stacie, of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; the author of several books, and of some 70 op-eds, essays and interviews published here at The Stone. He developed his work for The Times into two well-received books, “What Philosophy Can Do” and “Talking God,” a series of interviews with philosophers on religious belief. He is the most prominently featured author in our print collection “The Stone Reader.” (NYT, 1.21.19 continues)
Selected Essays by Gary Gutting at The Stone:
Who Needs a Gun?
Philosophy — What’s the Use?
What Work Is Really For
Is Our Patriotism Moral?
Mozart vs. The Beatles
Mary and the Zombies: Can Science Explain Consciousness?
On Being Catholic
Does It Matter Whether God Exists?
Why Do I Teach?
Is Voting Out of Self-Interest Wrong?
Who Needs a Gun?
Philosophy — What’s the Use?
What Work Is Really For
Is Our Patriotism Moral?
Mozart vs. The Beatles
Mary and the Zombies: Can Science Explain Consciousness?
On Being Catholic
Does It Matter Whether God Exists?
Why Do I Teach?
Is Voting Out of Self-Interest Wrong?
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
Questions MAR 1, 3
Doubt Delineated. Life After Faith (LAF) preface, 1; PRESENTATION: Conor, James and Jung on religion...
1. How did James characterize fervent unbelief?
2. What is the "core of secularist doubt"?
3. What's a sensu divinitatis?
4. Religious epistemologists neglect what?
5. What was Clifford's position on the ethics of belief?
6. What's "soft atheism"?
Kitcher on YouTube... Terry Lectures...
DQ:
THE STONE
The Case for ‘Soft Atheism’
By GARY GUTTING
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
This is the sixth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book “Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism.”
Gary Gutting: You have said that you “take religious doctrines to have become incredible.” Why do you think that?
It is possible to reject all religious doctrines as false without dismissing religion itself as noxious rubbish.
Philip Kitcher: An opening clarification: I don’t think focusing on religious doctrine, as opposed to religious experience or practice, is always the best way of considering a religious perspective. Nonetheless, most religions do offer doctrines about aspects of the world that go beyond the things of everyday experience. They tell us about gods or spirits or ancestors who return or special forces or sacred qualities of particular places.
The most basic reason for doubt about any of these ideas is that (when you understand words in their normal, everyday senses) nobody is prepared to accept all of them. Even if you suppose that Judaism, Christianity and Islam share some common conception of a divine being, the Hindu deities are surely different, the spirits and ancestors of African and Native American religions different again, and that’s before we get to Melanesian mana or the aboriginal Australian Dreamtime. It’s very hard to think that every one of these radically different conceptions picks out some aspect of our cosmos.
So asserting the doctrines of a particular religion, or family of religions, requires denying other contrary doctrines. However, when you consider the historical processes underlying the doctrines contemporary believers accept, those processes turn out to be very similar: Long ago there was some special event, a revelation to remote ancestors. Religious doctrine has been transmitted across the generations, and it’s learned by novice believers today. If the devout Christian had been brought up in a completely different environment — among aboriginal Australians or in a Hindu community, say — that person would believe radically different doctrines, and, moreover, come to believe them in a completely parallel fashion. On what basis, then, can you distinguish the profound truth of your doctrines from the misguided ideas of alternative traditions?
G.G.: But as you yourself suggest, doctrines aren’t necessarily the most important thing about religions. Many believers see doctrinal pronouncements as just halting ways of expressing experiences of a divine reality — experiences that are largely similar across the varieties of religious doctrines.
P.K.: The trouble with this proposal is that such happenings aren’t independent of the religious ideas available in the surrounding culture. Yes, people who grow up in quite different traditions have similar experiences — experiences they take to be religious — but they characterize them using the categories of the religions with which they’re familiar. Moreover, as people who have studied religious experience, from William James on, have understood very clearly, an experience someone takes to be an encounter with the divine might have all sorts of psychological causes — and, of course, such experiences are often claimed by people who are psychotic, or who are under the influence of drugs, or who are experiencing severe stress. The point has long been appreciated by the major religions of the world, which have taken pains to distinguish “genuine” experiences from those that might promulgate heresy.
Further, scholars studying the evolution of religious doctrines have learned that important ideas of major religions have been introduced in response to the political requirements of some historical situation — even though Jesus received a Roman punishment (crucifixion), it would not have been a bright idea, in a Rome-dominated world, to pinpoint the Romans as responsible, and the problem was resolved by finding a way to cast blame on the Jews (preparing the way for centuries of prejudice and hostility).
Further still, religions today adapt their doctrines so as to recruit particular types of people as converts — proselytizers often target people who have just moved to unfamiliar surroundings and who lack close friends (to cite just one example). The historical route to contemporary religious doctrines is full of transitions that have very little to do with the identification of truth. If you’re concerned to believe what is true, you should find all of these doctrines incredible.
G.G.: So you reject all religious doctrines, but you also say that you “resist the claim that religion is noxious rubbish to be buried as deeply, as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.” Why is that?
P.K.: The past decade has seen some trenchant attacks on religion, and I agree with many points made by people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. (Dennett seems to me clearly the most sophisticated of the “new atheists”; much as I admire Dawkins’s work in evolutionary biology and in enhancing the public understanding of science, he is more often off-target in his diatribes against religion.) But these atheists have been rightly criticized for treating all religions as if they were collections of doctrines, to be understood in quite literal ways, and for not attending to episodes in which the world’s religions have sometimes sustained the unfortunate and campaigned for the downtrodden. The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice.
G.G.: So on your view, Dawkins and company don’t refute all forms of religion, just unsophisticated literal assertions of religious claims.
P.K.: Yes, I think there’s a version of religion, “refined religion,” that is untouched by the new atheists’ criticisms, and that even survives my argument that religious doctrines are incredible. Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both. To say that God made a covenant with Abraham doesn’t mean that, long ago, some very impressive figure with a white beard negotiated a bargain with a Mesopotamian pastoralist. It is rather to commit yourself to advancing what is most deeply and ultimately valuable, as the story says Abraham did.
G.G.: And so, since they don’t regard them as factual, refined believers don’t have to deny the stories and metaphors of other religions.
P.K.: Right, they don’t have to pick and choose among the religions of the world. They see all religions as asserting that there is more to the cosmos than is dreamed of either in our mundane thoughts or in our most advanced scientific descriptions. Different cultures gesture toward the “transcendent” facets of reality in their many alternative myths and stories. None of the myths is factually true, although they’re all true in the sense that their “fruits for life” are good. Prominent examples of refined believers include William James, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and, in our own day, Karen Armstrong, Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. When refined religion is thoroughly embedded, religious tolerance thrives, and often much good work is done.
G.G.: Are you, then, willing to tolerate refined religion as a morally and intellectually respectable position?
Perhaps I’m a more insidious foe of religion than Dennett and Dawkins. For instead of ignoring important species of religion, I want to prepare the way for their gradual disappearance.
P.K.: I see refined religion as a halfway house. In the end, a thoroughly secular perspective, one that doesn’t suppose there to be some “higher” aspect of reality to serve as the ground of values (or as the ground of assurance that the important values can be realized), can do everything refined religion can do, without becoming entangled in mysteries and difficult problems. Most important, this positive secular humanism focuses directly on the needs of others, treating people as valuable without supposing that the value derives from some allegedly higher source. The supposed “transcendent” toward which the world’s religions gesture is both a distraction and a detour.
To sum up: There is more to religion than accepting as literally true doctrines that are literally false. Humanists think the important achievements of religions at their best — fostering community, articulating and supporting values — should be preserved in fashioning a fully secular world. That secular world ought to emerge from a dialogue between humanism and refined religion, one in which religion isn’t thrown on the rubbish heap but quietly metamorphoses into something else.
I’m a humanist first and an atheist second. Because I’m more sympathetic to religion than the prominent new atheists, I label my position “soft atheism.” But perhaps I’m a more insidious foe than Dennett and Dawkins. For instead of ignoring important species of religion, I want to prepare the way for their gradual disappearance.
G.G.: I wonder, though, why you say you’re an atheist at all. You find incredible the specific accounts of deity that doctrinal religions assert. But does that mean anything more than that you don’t believe any of these accounts? Why take the next, atheistic, step of saying that the accounts are all false? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe yourself as an agnostic, at least about some doctrinal claims?
P.K.: The clear message of all the conflicting doctrines of the world’s religions, when treated nonmetaphorically, is that, even if a “transcendent” should exist, all our categories for describing it are woefully inadequate. To borrow a phrase from the late, great philosopher Bernard Williams, any modestly literal thought about it is “one thought too many.” We should therefore reject substantive religious doctrines, one and all, even the minimal ones (“an intelligent source of the world’s order,” “a creator”).
So here’s a very simple reason I call myself an “a-theist”: theism embodies a very specific way of thinking about the “transcendent,” accepted by some but by no means all religious traditions — namely that there’s at least one deity — and if you suppose, as I do, that all substantive doctrines about any “transcendent” are wrong, you have to think theism is false.
G.G.: I don’t see the logic here. Your premise is “all our categories for describing the transcendent are woefully inadequate,” from which you conclude that “all substantive doctrines about any transcendent are wrong.” There are all sorts of things that our categories are inadequate for describing, from how bananas taste to what it means to love someone. We don’t conclude that bananas have no taste or that there’s no such thing as love. In any case, I don’t see why you say we should deny that the transcendent exists rather than taking no stance on its existence.
P.K.: I don’t see the parallel. It seems to me that we can say quite a lot about love and at least a bit about bananas. Partly that’s because we have plenty of uncontroversial experience of both.
But let me try to be more explicit. Why reject the “transcendent” rather than simply taking no stance on the issue of its reality? I start from the idea that all sorts of human inquiries, including but not limited to the natural sciences, have given us a picture of the world, and that these inquiries don’t provide evidence for any transcendent aspect of the universe. Epistemic humility should incline us to believe that our picture is incomplete, but if someone proposes that proteins fold into their three-dimensional configurations with the help of an army of ghostly beings, I don’t think I’m dogmatic in rejecting their suggestion. So why should I take a different attitude toward the proposal that there’s a “transcendent”?
G.G.: One reason is that many people have what they take to be direct experiences of something that transcends the domain of ordinary and scientific experience.
P.K.: To my mind, the experiences labeled “religious” come in two main types. There are some best understood in psychiatric terms. There are others, perhaps the overwhelming majority, that happen to people when they feel a great sense of uplift, often at the rightness of things. After all, experiences of this sort are felt by completely secular people who classify them without appeal to religious language. As Dewey pointed out, referring such experiences to some special aspect of reality is gratuitous speculation.
G.G.: I have in mind rather experiences people describe as of a transcendent reality — what William James calls experiences of a divine presence. But in addition to religious experience, there are respectable, even if not compelling, philosophical cases for the existence of a transcendent being — e.g., a first case of the universe, an ultimate source of value, a perfection that must exist.
P.K.: Even if people want to say that they feel a “divine presence” on these occasions, that seems to testify to the pervasive religious ideas that surround them, rather than to any reality beyond the mundane world. As to theistic arguments, some of the world’s religions have offered such arguments in support of their doctrines, although often different groups within a religious tradition will differ radically in judgments about the value of these exercises. Rational theology proceeds partly on the basis of principles also used in areas of rigorous inquiry (logical principles, for example) and partly on the basis of metaphysical additions, frequently varying across traditions. To my mind all these metaphysical add-ons are dubious. Indeed, many of them seem purpose-built to generate the desired conclusions. Concepts like that of a “necessary being” are problematic outgrowths of particular parochial traditions. We should think of the arguments of rational theology as supplements to a faith whose sources lie elsewhere (as, I believe, many theologians have always taken them to be).
G.G.: I agree that no theistic arguments are compelling, but I don’t agree that they all are logically invalid or have obviously false premises. I think the best arguments (especially, sophisticated versions of the cosmological argument) are dubious only in the sense that they use premises (e.g., any contingent thing requires a cause) that are not obviously true but that a rational person might properly believe. But settling our disagreement on this would require a thorough discussion of particular arguments.
P.K.: I agree that working that through would take a lot of words. But quite apart from that, I think religion at its best — the religion that prompts my admiration and sympathy — detaches itself from dubious metaphysics and from speculations about a “transcendent” to which our concepts are surely inadequate. It focuses on human problems, attempting to relieve want and misery, to provide opportunities for worthwhile life, and to deepen and extend important values.
Pragmatist that I am, I have little sympathy for strained discussions about whether God had to allow evil in order to create beings with free will, and even less for cheap gibes to the effect that religious faith is analogous to a child’s belief in the Easter bunny. Let’s be inspired by the world’s collection of religious metaphors insofar as they help us improve the human situation. Humanism first, atheism second. The atheism I favor is one in which literal talk about “God” or other supposed manifestations of the “transcendent” comes to be seen as a distraction from the important human problems — a form of language that quietly disappears.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series were with Alvin Plantinga, Louise Antony,John D. Caputo, Howard Wettstein and Jay L. Garfield.
1. How did James characterize fervent unbelief?
2. What is the "core of secularist doubt"?
3. What's a sensu divinitatis?
4. Religious epistemologists neglect what?
5. What was Clifford's position on the ethics of belief?
6. What's "soft atheism"?
Kitcher on YouTube... Terry Lectures...
DQ:
- Do you agree with James's characterization of fervent unbelief?
- Do you think transcendence can happen within the "mundane physical world"? 3
- If you're religious, how would you describe your own "doctrinal profile" (5)? If you're not, what's your attitude towards believers whose profile is literalist, or indefinite?
- Do you agree that nobody thinks all religious claims can be accommodated? 7
- Why do you think so many religious people are credulous with regard to "privileged witnesses in a remote past"? 8
- What doesn't it give everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, more pause to realize that if they'd been brought up in a different culture they'd "now affirm a radically different set of doctrines"? 8
- Is "sophisticated" theology and "advanced" religion more likely to be rationally justified or true? 9
- Do you agree that religious experiences always invoke familiar categories? 12
- Are religious experiences more likely to happen to people who are psychologically disturbed or under the influence of substances that impair perception? 14
- Do you think James's mountaineer and suitor (17) support a religious "leap of faith"?
- Should secularists admit the possibility that we'll someday discover something "deep about the universe" that vindicates religion? 20
- COMMENT: "The proper secularist attitude is agnosticism." 22
THE STONE
The Case for ‘Soft Atheism’
By GARY GUTTING
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
This is the sixth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book “Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism.”
Gary Gutting: You have said that you “take religious doctrines to have become incredible.” Why do you think that?
It is possible to reject all religious doctrines as false without dismissing religion itself as noxious rubbish.
Philip Kitcher: An opening clarification: I don’t think focusing on religious doctrine, as opposed to religious experience or practice, is always the best way of considering a religious perspective. Nonetheless, most religions do offer doctrines about aspects of the world that go beyond the things of everyday experience. They tell us about gods or spirits or ancestors who return or special forces or sacred qualities of particular places.
The most basic reason for doubt about any of these ideas is that (when you understand words in their normal, everyday senses) nobody is prepared to accept all of them. Even if you suppose that Judaism, Christianity and Islam share some common conception of a divine being, the Hindu deities are surely different, the spirits and ancestors of African and Native American religions different again, and that’s before we get to Melanesian mana or the aboriginal Australian Dreamtime. It’s very hard to think that every one of these radically different conceptions picks out some aspect of our cosmos.
So asserting the doctrines of a particular religion, or family of religions, requires denying other contrary doctrines. However, when you consider the historical processes underlying the doctrines contemporary believers accept, those processes turn out to be very similar: Long ago there was some special event, a revelation to remote ancestors. Religious doctrine has been transmitted across the generations, and it’s learned by novice believers today. If the devout Christian had been brought up in a completely different environment — among aboriginal Australians or in a Hindu community, say — that person would believe radically different doctrines, and, moreover, come to believe them in a completely parallel fashion. On what basis, then, can you distinguish the profound truth of your doctrines from the misguided ideas of alternative traditions?
G.G.: But as you yourself suggest, doctrines aren’t necessarily the most important thing about religions. Many believers see doctrinal pronouncements as just halting ways of expressing experiences of a divine reality — experiences that are largely similar across the varieties of religious doctrines.
P.K.: The trouble with this proposal is that such happenings aren’t independent of the religious ideas available in the surrounding culture. Yes, people who grow up in quite different traditions have similar experiences — experiences they take to be religious — but they characterize them using the categories of the religions with which they’re familiar. Moreover, as people who have studied religious experience, from William James on, have understood very clearly, an experience someone takes to be an encounter with the divine might have all sorts of psychological causes — and, of course, such experiences are often claimed by people who are psychotic, or who are under the influence of drugs, or who are experiencing severe stress. The point has long been appreciated by the major religions of the world, which have taken pains to distinguish “genuine” experiences from those that might promulgate heresy.
Further, scholars studying the evolution of religious doctrines have learned that important ideas of major religions have been introduced in response to the political requirements of some historical situation — even though Jesus received a Roman punishment (crucifixion), it would not have been a bright idea, in a Rome-dominated world, to pinpoint the Romans as responsible, and the problem was resolved by finding a way to cast blame on the Jews (preparing the way for centuries of prejudice and hostility).
Further still, religions today adapt their doctrines so as to recruit particular types of people as converts — proselytizers often target people who have just moved to unfamiliar surroundings and who lack close friends (to cite just one example). The historical route to contemporary religious doctrines is full of transitions that have very little to do with the identification of truth. If you’re concerned to believe what is true, you should find all of these doctrines incredible.
G.G.: So you reject all religious doctrines, but you also say that you “resist the claim that religion is noxious rubbish to be buried as deeply, as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.” Why is that?
P.K.: The past decade has seen some trenchant attacks on religion, and I agree with many points made by people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. (Dennett seems to me clearly the most sophisticated of the “new atheists”; much as I admire Dawkins’s work in evolutionary biology and in enhancing the public understanding of science, he is more often off-target in his diatribes against religion.) But these atheists have been rightly criticized for treating all religions as if they were collections of doctrines, to be understood in quite literal ways, and for not attending to episodes in which the world’s religions have sometimes sustained the unfortunate and campaigned for the downtrodden. The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice.
G.G.: So on your view, Dawkins and company don’t refute all forms of religion, just unsophisticated literal assertions of religious claims.
P.K.: Yes, I think there’s a version of religion, “refined religion,” that is untouched by the new atheists’ criticisms, and that even survives my argument that religious doctrines are incredible. Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both. To say that God made a covenant with Abraham doesn’t mean that, long ago, some very impressive figure with a white beard negotiated a bargain with a Mesopotamian pastoralist. It is rather to commit yourself to advancing what is most deeply and ultimately valuable, as the story says Abraham did.
G.G.: And so, since they don’t regard them as factual, refined believers don’t have to deny the stories and metaphors of other religions.
P.K.: Right, they don’t have to pick and choose among the religions of the world. They see all religions as asserting that there is more to the cosmos than is dreamed of either in our mundane thoughts or in our most advanced scientific descriptions. Different cultures gesture toward the “transcendent” facets of reality in their many alternative myths and stories. None of the myths is factually true, although they’re all true in the sense that their “fruits for life” are good. Prominent examples of refined believers include William James, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and, in our own day, Karen Armstrong, Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. When refined religion is thoroughly embedded, religious tolerance thrives, and often much good work is done.
G.G.: Are you, then, willing to tolerate refined religion as a morally and intellectually respectable position?
Perhaps I’m a more insidious foe of religion than Dennett and Dawkins. For instead of ignoring important species of religion, I want to prepare the way for their gradual disappearance.
P.K.: I see refined religion as a halfway house. In the end, a thoroughly secular perspective, one that doesn’t suppose there to be some “higher” aspect of reality to serve as the ground of values (or as the ground of assurance that the important values can be realized), can do everything refined religion can do, without becoming entangled in mysteries and difficult problems. Most important, this positive secular humanism focuses directly on the needs of others, treating people as valuable without supposing that the value derives from some allegedly higher source. The supposed “transcendent” toward which the world’s religions gesture is both a distraction and a detour.
To sum up: There is more to religion than accepting as literally true doctrines that are literally false. Humanists think the important achievements of religions at their best — fostering community, articulating and supporting values — should be preserved in fashioning a fully secular world. That secular world ought to emerge from a dialogue between humanism and refined religion, one in which religion isn’t thrown on the rubbish heap but quietly metamorphoses into something else.
I’m a humanist first and an atheist second. Because I’m more sympathetic to religion than the prominent new atheists, I label my position “soft atheism.” But perhaps I’m a more insidious foe than Dennett and Dawkins. For instead of ignoring important species of religion, I want to prepare the way for their gradual disappearance.
G.G.: I wonder, though, why you say you’re an atheist at all. You find incredible the specific accounts of deity that doctrinal religions assert. But does that mean anything more than that you don’t believe any of these accounts? Why take the next, atheistic, step of saying that the accounts are all false? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe yourself as an agnostic, at least about some doctrinal claims?
P.K.: The clear message of all the conflicting doctrines of the world’s religions, when treated nonmetaphorically, is that, even if a “transcendent” should exist, all our categories for describing it are woefully inadequate. To borrow a phrase from the late, great philosopher Bernard Williams, any modestly literal thought about it is “one thought too many.” We should therefore reject substantive religious doctrines, one and all, even the minimal ones (“an intelligent source of the world’s order,” “a creator”).
So here’s a very simple reason I call myself an “a-theist”: theism embodies a very specific way of thinking about the “transcendent,” accepted by some but by no means all religious traditions — namely that there’s at least one deity — and if you suppose, as I do, that all substantive doctrines about any “transcendent” are wrong, you have to think theism is false.
G.G.: I don’t see the logic here. Your premise is “all our categories for describing the transcendent are woefully inadequate,” from which you conclude that “all substantive doctrines about any transcendent are wrong.” There are all sorts of things that our categories are inadequate for describing, from how bananas taste to what it means to love someone. We don’t conclude that bananas have no taste or that there’s no such thing as love. In any case, I don’t see why you say we should deny that the transcendent exists rather than taking no stance on its existence.
P.K.: I don’t see the parallel. It seems to me that we can say quite a lot about love and at least a bit about bananas. Partly that’s because we have plenty of uncontroversial experience of both.
But let me try to be more explicit. Why reject the “transcendent” rather than simply taking no stance on the issue of its reality? I start from the idea that all sorts of human inquiries, including but not limited to the natural sciences, have given us a picture of the world, and that these inquiries don’t provide evidence for any transcendent aspect of the universe. Epistemic humility should incline us to believe that our picture is incomplete, but if someone proposes that proteins fold into their three-dimensional configurations with the help of an army of ghostly beings, I don’t think I’m dogmatic in rejecting their suggestion. So why should I take a different attitude toward the proposal that there’s a “transcendent”?
G.G.: One reason is that many people have what they take to be direct experiences of something that transcends the domain of ordinary and scientific experience.
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P.K.: To my mind, the experiences labeled “religious” come in two main types. There are some best understood in psychiatric terms. There are others, perhaps the overwhelming majority, that happen to people when they feel a great sense of uplift, often at the rightness of things. After all, experiences of this sort are felt by completely secular people who classify them without appeal to religious language. As Dewey pointed out, referring such experiences to some special aspect of reality is gratuitous speculation.
G.G.: I have in mind rather experiences people describe as of a transcendent reality — what William James calls experiences of a divine presence. But in addition to religious experience, there are respectable, even if not compelling, philosophical cases for the existence of a transcendent being — e.g., a first case of the universe, an ultimate source of value, a perfection that must exist.
P.K.: Even if people want to say that they feel a “divine presence” on these occasions, that seems to testify to the pervasive religious ideas that surround them, rather than to any reality beyond the mundane world. As to theistic arguments, some of the world’s religions have offered such arguments in support of their doctrines, although often different groups within a religious tradition will differ radically in judgments about the value of these exercises. Rational theology proceeds partly on the basis of principles also used in areas of rigorous inquiry (logical principles, for example) and partly on the basis of metaphysical additions, frequently varying across traditions. To my mind all these metaphysical add-ons are dubious. Indeed, many of them seem purpose-built to generate the desired conclusions. Concepts like that of a “necessary being” are problematic outgrowths of particular parochial traditions. We should think of the arguments of rational theology as supplements to a faith whose sources lie elsewhere (as, I believe, many theologians have always taken them to be).
G.G.: I agree that no theistic arguments are compelling, but I don’t agree that they all are logically invalid or have obviously false premises. I think the best arguments (especially, sophisticated versions of the cosmological argument) are dubious only in the sense that they use premises (e.g., any contingent thing requires a cause) that are not obviously true but that a rational person might properly believe. But settling our disagreement on this would require a thorough discussion of particular arguments.
P.K.: I agree that working that through would take a lot of words. But quite apart from that, I think religion at its best — the religion that prompts my admiration and sympathy — detaches itself from dubious metaphysics and from speculations about a “transcendent” to which our concepts are surely inadequate. It focuses on human problems, attempting to relieve want and misery, to provide opportunities for worthwhile life, and to deepen and extend important values.
Pragmatist that I am, I have little sympathy for strained discussions about whether God had to allow evil in order to create beings with free will, and even less for cheap gibes to the effect that religious faith is analogous to a child’s belief in the Easter bunny. Let’s be inspired by the world’s collection of religious metaphors insofar as they help us improve the human situation. Humanism first, atheism second. The atheism I favor is one in which literal talk about “God” or other supposed manifestations of the “transcendent” comes to be seen as a distraction from the important human problems — a form of language that quietly disappears.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series were with Alvin Plantinga, Louise Antony,John D. Caputo, Howard Wettstein and Jay L. Garfield.
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LAF ch2-
1. (Again:) Plato's Euthyphro poses what dilemma, and why does the popular perception of a tight link between religion and ethics persist?
2. Saying that ethical deliberations answer only to a local ethical code leads to what?
3. In the rudimentary ethical project of our ancestors, the likeliest emotion motivating conformity was what? (Hint: listen to the 2,000 Year Old Man...transcript)
4. What is the important achievement of ethical revolutionaries?
5. What Deweyan judgment does Kitcher say we should endorse?
6. The center of secular value is what?
DQ:
2. Saying that ethical deliberations answer only to a local ethical code leads to what?
3. In the rudimentary ethical project of our ancestors, the likeliest emotion motivating conformity was what? (Hint: listen to the 2,000 Year Old Man...transcript)
4. What is the important achievement of ethical revolutionaries?
5. What Deweyan judgment does Kitcher say we should endorse?
6. The center of secular value is what?
DQ:
- Do you agree that most secular accounts "reduce ethical life to the expression of subjective attitudes"? 27 Are inter-subjective attitudes stronger?
- Why do you think Kitcher considers Darwinian construals of goodness in terms of reproductive success inadequate? 29 Do you agree?
- How do you explain the widely-shared recognition of the wrongness of slavery (30) and the growth of "responsiveness" (32)?
- Was there a non-arbitrary threshold that truly began the ethical project? 36
- Is "progress from," rooted in problem-solving, a better concept than progress to a fixed goal? (42) Is progress real?
- Do you agree that "truth happens to an idea" rather than subsisting eternally? 45
- Is there a cure for our "old disease"? 48
- Is it fair to insist that participants in ethical discussions "accept a ban on appealing to substantive religious doctrines"? 50
- Is a redistribution of material resources and reconfiguration of economic and political institutions essential to the ethical project? 51
- Is there a place for Nietzschean "free spirits" in the evolution of ethics? 52
- Do you agree that we're "always already" ethical? 53
- Can fiction do philosophical and ethical work? 55 Does good fiction do it better than philosophy? Can you give an example?
Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds
Children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households, according to a new study.
Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.
They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.
“Overall, our findings ... contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology... (continues)
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