(The following is the tail end from a comment I made elsewhere on the site, that I felt was worth placing a bit more prominently.)
Society’s problem isn’t belief in God, and eradicating theistic belief is not an admirable goal. If someone were to successfully eliminate all God-belief tomorrow, some other superstition would immediately arise to take its place, and become the basis for various travesties. The problem, then, is in our willingness to accept superstitious, unverifiable beliefs as not only a replacement for, but actually superior to verifiable evidence, and not with any one such superstition that may happen to be a current favorite.
The consequences of the actions we take should be commensurate with the firmness of our beliefs; the firmness of our beliefs should be commensurate with the quantity and reliability of the supporting evidence. I have no problem with belief in God that is honestly ready to shed itself in light of contradictory evidence, and I have little patience with atheists who lack that same readiness.
I have no problem with belief in God that is honestly ready to shed itself in light of contradictory evidence…
There are no such believers; you are giving them too much benefit of the doubt. To a believer, “contradictory evidence” is logically impossible; belief in God is compatible with any evidence observed. There are only three reasons to believe in a God, or to hold any superstition: inability to reason, ignorance about how to reason, or willful refusal to reason.
Barefoot,
There are certainly a very large number of believers who fit your description, I know quite a few of them. However, remember that, since the existence of God is in fact an unfalsifiable proposition, it cannot be disproved. Only specific concepts of God can be disproved. You were raised in Quakerism, yes? How disprovable do you find their particular beliefs (particularly the more liberal varieties of Quakerism)? Certainly their beliefs (the most foundational being that every person has a bit of God in them) fall well afoul of Occam’s Razor, but that’s not the same as having actual contradictory evidence.
There are a couple of forms of “liberal Christianity” I’ve encountered, most often personalized varieties, that appear to hold their faith somewhat lightly. This too falls under the sort of faith I’m talking about.
I might have worded it a bit better: since as I’ve already pointed out, God is unfalsifiable, I’m really talking about an adaptable faith: a faith that can make adjustments to itself in the face of clear, opposing data. Such a faith is still extremely likely to be false, but so long as it is willing to cede ground wherever the truth is clear, it is an essentially harmless one. I have definitely encountered instances of such faith (it seems more often to be personal than institutional). Hell, if my own had not been, I don’t see how I could have become an atheist.
I believe there may be additional reasons for belief in God beyond your list. Not understanding the principle of the “default position” in a debate (or giving it insufficient credit), or the importance of falsifiable positions, are the main flaws in “weak theism” like that of the Quakers or the various “foofy” beliefs: it’s not technically a flaw in reasoning, but of starting from a false premise.
There is also the possibility for reasoning accurately from flawed data. I don’t think that any beliefs are held in place by this exclusively, but a major reason why I was able to believe in Young-Earth Creationism for the vast majority of my current life, is because I was fed absolute lies about the arguments and claims of evolutionary scientists, straw men that were easy to knock down (thus requiring no departure from reason). It was my failure to verify these, of course, primarily because I trusted the (“godly”) sources to at least not lie through their teeth (shame on you, John Morris), and it was coupled with an ignorance about reason (or, later, a blindness to my own hypocritical application of reason, using one system for God and another for everything else); but it certainly was a contributing reason for my God-belief.
[I have made mild formatting edits to this comment, to improve the readability of quoted material. —mjc]
Hi Micah,
I want to let you know that I have still been reading your blog. I find it very interesting. I have started to respond several times but decided to exercise some discipline, and take a ( shut up, listen, and learn ) approach for a while. Kinda tough on me, especially the shut up part.
Thanks for this comment Micah
Society’s problem isn’t belief in God, and eradicating theistic belief is not an admirable goal. If someone were to successfully eliminate all God-belief tomorrow, some other superstition would immediately arise to take its place, and become the basis for various travesties. The problem, then, is in our willingness to accept superstitious, unverifiable beliefs as not only a replacement for, but actually superior to verifiable evidence, and not with any one such superstition that may happen to be a current favorite.
People are fond of pointing out the many atrocities committed in the name of religion, especially Christianity, sadly its all true. But the implication is frequently that religion was the cause. I believe that is rarely if ever the case. Ironically my son brought home a copy of Mein Kampf which I neglected to read when I was in school. Hitler borrowed heavily from The Origin of Species. Another sacred text exploited.
Barefoot bum said
There are only three reasons to believe in a God, or to hold any superstition: inability to reason, ignorance about how to reason, or willful refusal to reason.
Hmmm, I guess I’d better go back to listening.
Thanks again Micah, for the intelligent, respectful discussion.
I have started to respond several times but decided to exercise some discipline, and take a ( shut up, listen, and learn ) approach for a while. Kinda tough on me, especially the shut up part.
Heh, yeah; that’s a continuing exercise for me as well. I have no idea why it’s so difficult. Guess it’s because we aren’t always as rational (will speaking up help here?) as we’d like to think.
People are fond of pointing out the many atrocities committed in the name of religion, especially Christianity, sadly its all true. But the implication is frequently that religion was the cause.
Well, the Crusades makes a prime example of one that most likely had religion as its root cause, especially since any other motivations would not have justified the cost of attempting to maintain control of a small region so very far away.
However, even when religious faith is not the cause, it makes itself heavily available for justification for such wars. Hitler was not Christian (though he also wasn’t atheist, for whatever that matters); but he very liberally (and successfully) manipulated religious belief to attain his objectives. The Puritans used the “heathen” status of the natives, coupled with murders that were committed by a single native working on his own, as an excuse to decimate entire peoples. Religion was not a significant motivating factor for the Iraq invasion, but Bush claimed that God told him to invade, and the divergence of support for the war between Evangelical Christians and the rest of the population is too striking to ignore.
And that’s what I’m talking about: God’s not the problem. If belief in God suddenly disappeared completely, but everything else remained the same, then people would find something new to believe in (“The convergence of the stars demands an invasion of Iraq”, “A certain arrangement of letter patterns in the Encyclopedia Britannica states very clearly that we should elect Joe Blow”), that would leave them just as exploitable by leadership.
In other words, I don’t believe that belief in God is the serious problem, but that its most common forms are often the symptoms of a serious problem. I’m just advocating that we treat the problem, not the symptoms; i.e., promote and strive for a culture that prizes critical thinking skills and rational thinking; if we could find success in that, the most irrational forms of faith will be devastated from beneath (they cannot in general be successfully attacked head-on in any case), leaving only the essentially harmless varieties.
Hey Micah,
It seems we are mostly in agreement. People with less than honorable intentions will use what ever is effective to achieve their goals. The fact that religion is so readily available for corruption is a testament to the fact that it provides moral guidance to so many people, and of coarse, there in lies the problem. many people don’t use the critical thinking skills you speak of and possibly become koolaid drinkers. (I’m trusting that you are old enough to remember the expression, it was a while back.)
It’s your last paragraph that brings up the most interesting questions.
Is reason a good source for morality?
What the hell is morality anyway?
Most theists will say that morality is completely objective. Absolute right and wrong as defined by God.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I would assume that an atheist would see morality as subjective. created by society in order that it may survive and prosper.
Both approaches have a rich history of corruption. We have already mentioned a few of religions ungodly misdirections. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment comes to mind as one of “reasons” less than noble endeavors.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject. I was deliberately vague so that we could go in any direction.
smeagain,
I’m trusting that you are old enough to remember the expression, it was a while back.
Actually, I still hear it fairly frequently. Perhaps in another few decades, people will no longer remember where it comes from. 🙂
Most theists will say that morality is completely objective. Absolute right and wrong as defined by God.
Even when you assume that definition (your second sentence), it’s not objective: since real-life situations often involve multiple commandments that prescribe conflicting responses, and you’re left to resolve (subjectively) which command holds more weight than the rest. The trivial example is where God commands us, “thou shalt not kill”, and yet in many other passages commands killing.
Is reason a good source for morality? What the hell is morality anyway?
(I’ve rearranged the order of your statements slightly.)
I don’t think that I’m ready to answer this in depth. I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts on the subject, but it is a very deep topic, and one with which philosophers have been struggling with for eons.
I do think that reason can be useful in discussing morality (obviously), but morality cannot be determined by reason alone: at some point you are left with a premise that cannot be proved. A great deal of moral reasoning seems to be along the lines of “you and I agree that A is wrong, and here is why B is similar to A, so therefore B is also wrong”. Argument by analogy is fallacious, and so not an appropriate way to discuss objective reality, but it does seem to be useful for discussing subjective viewpoints.
Personally, I use my emotions to guide my actions. Of course, I don’t mean by this “I do whatever my emotions prompt me to do” 😉 – I mean that I monitor how I feel when I contemplate doing something. If it gives me “warm fuzzies”, it’s probably good; if it gives me “cold pricklies”, it’s probably bad. As the title of a book goes, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”.
This is surprisingly effective, and contributes to my well-being in ways beyond morality. My wife and I are never at odds for long, because neither of us can stand the “cold prickly” of being emotionally separated. We generally make up quickly.
According to conventional Christian assumptions, without the moral direction God provides, I should have quickly decayed into a hedonistic lifestyle, living only for whatever pleases me. And I do live for what pleases me (what else is there to live for?). But what if “what pleases me” is the ability to feel good about myself? The knowledge that my wife loves me, and that I don’t have some dark secret whose revelation would cause my wife frustration, hurt, or betrayal? To look myself in the eye at the mirror without regret? Living for my own pleasure is not the same thing as living for instant gratification; discipline is the ability to trade intense-but-brief short-term pleasures for greater long-term happiness. This doesn’t require a Holy Code, but a bit of wisdom and foresight.
Micah,
When I say “defined by God” I don’t mean to imply that God has the rules written down somewhere. Though I realize that fundamentalist Christians treat the bible as the infallible word of God and ultimate guide for morality. At least what they say the bible says. I simply mean that a theist would see morality as absolute and not dependent on how or if it is viewed by society.
Micah said,
“I don’t think that I’m ready to answer this in depth. I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts on the subject, but it is a very deep topic, and one with which philosophers have been struggling with for eons.”
Yeah, I also think a great deal on this topic and I’m not satisfied with what I’ve come up with so far, that’s why I’m picking your brain. You and your philosophers that have been working on this for eons are letting me down.;-)
It seems that both the religious and nonreligious use your fancy tools for determining right and wrong, “warm fuzzies and cold pricklies”, the religious just have the added (benefit?) of someone making sure that they get cold pricklies about more things. These feelings of right and wrong or “the knowledge of good and evil” seem to be instinctive, but could very well be social conditioning, or both.
All of this brings me back to the title of your post. For you, on a personal level, it seems eliminating God was the answer. Being raised as a Christian fundamentalist your faith couldn’t be reconciled with your sense of morality. Eliminating God enabled you to create your own system of beliefs that would put your conscience at ease.
For me it was remarkably similar. The biggest difference being that I seem to require an objective morality. It wouldn’t mean anything to me otherwise. So I also created a religion to suit my needs. A new twist on the old cliche “creating God in our own image.”
Sorry, I didn’t mean to psychoanalyze you. I may be all wet, I don’t even Know you. But if I’m right, I thought the parallel between us was interesting. Too bad we’re already married. ;->
When I say “defined by God” I don’t mean to imply that God has the rules written down somewhere. Though I realize that fundamentalist Christians treat the bible as the infallible word of God and ultimate guide for morality. At least what they say the bible says. I simply mean that a theist would see morality as absolute and not dependent on how or if it is viewed by society.
Ah, okay, I see what you mean. Though, since Christians can’t tell what all the rules are if they weren’t all written down, the difference is probably pointless. I do understand though that most Evangelical Christians take great offense at the idea that morality might not be absolute.
All of this brings me back to the title of your post. For you, on a personal level, it seems eliminating God was the answer. Being raised as a Christian fundamentalist your faith couldn’t be reconciled with your sense of morality. Eliminating God enabled you to create your own system of beliefs that would put your conscience at ease.
Hm, interesting. I’ve never thought of it that way.
I wouldn’t say that my sense of morality having conflicts with that of Christianity had much to do with my leaving. Most of my realizations that Christian morality have overbearing aspects came after my deconversion. I was fairly deeply affected by the gay-persecution theme of the movie V for Vendetta on the night before I decided to announce my lack of faith; but many Christians manage to reconcile their faith with support for gay rights, and I don’t think it had a large role to play in my own story. The driving force for my deconversion was a slow but building realization that it was my faith was only standing on a foundation of severe intellectual dishonesty, to which I had been blinded.
A little of me rebels at the notion that I “create my own system of beliefs”. I feel more like it’s a process of discovery, in that I don’t usually get to actually choose what I believe is right and wrong, just as I didn’t choose to stop finding Christianity to be believable.
Was Eliminating God the answer for me? It was certainly a turning point. But I feel like it was more a milestone in my journey toward understanding truth and abandoning dishonesty with myself, more than the actual journey itself.
You wrote: “If someone were to successfully eliminate all God-belief tomorrow, some other superstition would immediately arise to take its place, and become the basis for various travesties. The problem, then, is in our willingness to accept superstitious, unverifiable beliefs as”
Superstition to believe in a Creator of the universe?
The left menu at bloganders.blogspot.com contains a formal logical proof of the existence of an Intelligent and Perfect Creator (of the universe).
Something proved by formal logic is not superstitious.
Anders
I’m sorry Anders, but all you proved is the patently obvious, that if the universe had a beginning, then there must have been a cause. The premise that the universe had a beginning in the sense that you mean it – that there was a point in time that separates the nonexistence of a universe from the existence of a universe – is meaningless, since by definition, time itself did not exist prior to the universe. It also assumes the universe does not encompass everything, since you obviously don’t mean it to encompass God, so something exists outside of that universe.
Ignoring all that, let’s assume the universe had a cause, as you say. After you make that point, you don’t use anything approaching formal logic to prove that this cause was a sentient, intelligent, and perfect being. In fact, past that point, I don’t see anything that resembles an argument, only assertions.