Quitting The Philosophy Of Religion - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

A philosopher abandons the teaching of the philosophy of religion and simultaneously points out the purposelessness of rehashing unconvincing arguments. Sometimes there aren't two sides to a story. He comments further:

I got tired of constantly being in the debunking mode, especially when you find yourself debunking the same thing repeatedly. That starts to feel like swatting flies. I used to be a subscriber and regular reader of The Skeptical Inquirer, but then I let my subscription expire. How many debunkings of ghosts, UFO's, and Bigfoot do you need? Likewise with "the case for theism." I think I really have heard it all by now, and my hearing has been patient and fair. Also, as I said before, I am also aware of works by Oppy, Sobel, Gale, Everitt, Le Poidevin, Martin, Drange, Schellenberg, and many others that have done the debunking so well that I really have nothing further to add.

As for the use of the term "fraud," I tried to make clear that I am talking about the arguments, not the arguers. Actually, "fraud" was probably a bad choice of words since it inevitably connotes deceit and dishonesty. My view of the "case for theism" is not that it is a dishonest fabrication but that it is completely vacuous.

Laughter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The cause of laughter in human beings:

Philosopher John Morreall theorizes that human laughter may have its biological origins as a kind of shared expression of relief at the passing of danger. Friedrich Nietzsche, by contrast, suggested laughter to be a reaction to the sense of existential loneliness and mortality that only humans feel.

For example, this is how this theory works in the case of humor: a joke creates an inconsistency, the sentence appears to be not relevant, and we automatically try to understand what the sentence says, supposes, doesn't say, and implies; if we are successful in solving this 'cognitive riddle', and we find out what is hidden within the sentence, and what is the underlying thought, and we bring foreground what was in the background, and we realize that the surprise wasn't dangerous, we eventually laugh with relief. Otherwise, if the inconsistency is not resolved, there is no laugh, as Mack Sennett pointed out: "when the audience is confused, it doesn't laugh" (this is the one of the basic laws of a comedian, called "exactness"). It is important to note that the inconsistency may be resolved, and there may still be no laugh. Due to the fact that laughter is a social mechanism, we may not feel like we are in danger, however, the physical act of laughing may not take place. In addition, the extent of the inconsistency (timing, rhythm, etc.) has to do with the amount of danger we feel, and thus how hard or long we laugh. This explanation is also confirmed by modern neurophysiology (see section Laughter and the brain).

At The Hour of Their Death, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Hate to be a jerk about it, but you may as well ask where the light goes when you switch off the light bulb. This line of spiritual thinking continues to deny the existence of death by engaging with it in childish ways.

The answer of course is nowhere. The light is produced by the electricity and the filament and the vacuum of the bulb, and the glass. It has no separate existence; no split nature.

The soul is how we describe the performance of the body, it is not a thing in and of itself. Driving is the soul of the car; Aces and eights are the soul of Black Jack. When you junk the car noone ask where the driving went.

Jesus And Christ, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan is lucid and sharp on every other topic. But when it comes to religion, his ideas go to mush. Frankly, I can't even follow it most of the time.

No Heroes, No Apologists

It's a problem. Writers, philosophers, revolutionaries. How should we judge them? By their ideas or by their actions?

The Problem of Autonomy

Crooked Timber has a pretty interesting discussion on the problem of autonomy which was sparked by a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go. The novel is both a science fiction story and a philosophical meditation. It concerns a near-future society in which clones exist for organ harvesting and focuses on the lives of the clones and the quasi-fascist class system that justifies and reenforces their exploitation.

What the discussion at CT finds even more provocative is the questions the book raises about how we understand concepts like individuality, autonomy, class, status, and group affiliation - ideas we tend to accept as static and not really subject to change:

Living in the US is more interesting still. The Irish experience – a small country where you very nearly know everyone, and everyone very nearly knows you (or at least, can place your family and mutual connections within a few minutes of starting to talk to you – Kieran had a post on this years ago) is probably quite foreign to most Americans. And getting away from it is liberating – it’s nice to live in a place where nobody knows about your background, and nobody would care if they did know. But there’s also a certain degree of comfort to knowing your place too. This is perhaps the source of the subtle horror that Walton detects in Ishiguro – the possibility that even if the clones could conceive of other possibilities than dying to have their organs harvested, they might not find these possibilities attractive. The disturbing element of Ishiguro’s work for left-liberals (and here, it might be interesting to trace out the relationships between NLMG and The Remains of the Day) is his suggestion that human beings may not want the kinds of autonomy that liberals presume they do, and that they might actively prefer to be defined by their social situation (even if this situation is one that we find distressing, upsetting and ethically unjustifiable).

So the problem of how we live in the world becomes one of balancing our own personal desires and ambitions with what is socially acceptable, and more importantly, provides us with a sense of belonging. The implication is that freedom comes with a cost: you can go anywhere and be anyone, but you belong nowhere and therefore you are no one. What this suggests is that many people would rather choose what seems to be a self-limiting and what looks from the outside to be a coercive lifestyle if it gives them a sense of purpose and the security of knowing one's place.

Class therefore is one of the many ways that society regulates itself and maintains the status quo, by appealing to the individual's ego and anxieties (the human mind itself is a rationalization machine that helps regulate and justify our emotional impulses after all). This is why group identity trumps reason and rational argument in all sorts of unexpected ways including political affiliation, consumer choices, and social attitudes.

The challenge for "left-liberals" is to test where those limits are in the real world. Where does social situation trump individual choice? And when does our own sense of distress, anxiety and ethically unjustifiable behavior fail to recognize someone else's feelings of comfort, rationalization, and emotional fulfillment -- even and especially if those feelings are really just excuses for living in denial, masking one's dysfunctional beliefs, and living in relationships that are codependent and self-destructive.

Does this ultimately boil down to a game of "I'm OK, you're in a cult"?

(Incidentally, this is territory explored in Season 3 of The Wire, as Stringer Bell tried to step out of "the game" and into the MBA world of legitimate business. The consequence of that particular story line is that he ended up an outsider in both worlds and paid the price.)

Imaginary Vengeance

As an addendum to my previous post, here's what Nietzsche had to say about the "woundedness" of religious fundamentalists:

The slave revolt in morals begins by rancor turning creative and giving birth to values -- the rancor of beings who, deprived of the direct outlet of action, compensate by an imaginary vengeance. All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand begins by saying no to an "outside," an "other," a non-self, and that no is its creative act. (Genealogy of Morals)

In other words, in order to affirmatively and spontaneously apply the Golden Rule compassionately, as Armstrong suggests, one must first overcome one's resentments and sense of isolation. The sense that one is a victim and that the "other" is to blame is one of the worst sorts of despair and leads only to suffering and violence through the logic of subject/object.

By contrast the "triumphant self-affirmation" is not egotistic or self-regarding, but, as he says in The Birth of Tragedy, an "'I' dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being." Nietzsche uses words like "noble", "aristocratic" and "heroic" to describe this quality, but these are just metaphors he uses for the artist. He's not celebrating feudalism or warfare (or nihilism or fascism), but using those fanciful phrases to engage the reader with the abstract possibilities of art and philosophy. His affirmation is like Molly Bloom with her "yes, I will, yes", and like Kierkegaard's tortured logic that leads to the self resting transparently in the spirit that gives it rise as a cure for the sickness unto death (despair). It is a rhetorical leap of faith into the creative possibilities of the imagination.

Living the Good Life

Matthew Yglesias had a short post yesterday on "The Tragedy of Agriculture" which attempts to get all counter-intuitive-y on, like, the whole last 10,000 years of human history. But the assertions are so broad and ticked off so quickly that I'm not sure I buy any of it:

Even modern-day hunter-gatherers, who in the nature of things don’t inhabit the most promising land, work shorter hours and enjoy happier lifestyles than do the poorest of modern-day subsistence farmers. The problem with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t — and isn’t — that it’s too labor intensive, it’s that it was too land-intensive. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only support a small number of people on a given parcel of land. If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up. That facilitates the division of labor and the creation of specialized warrior castes and so forth. Consequently, a settled society will probably be able to conquer a hunter-gatherer population and/or drive them off their land. Thus, once this quality-of-life-destroying innovation comes into being it tends to spread inexorably. The higher level of inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be better-off than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure quantity of people alive goes way up, a la Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. It’s only with the coming of the industrial revolution that societies with higher average quality-of-life than those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers come into existence. And over time, that circle of beneficiaries of industrialization has tended to spread.

Back in the early 90s it was hunter-gatherer nomad societies that were seen as sort of problematically violent and patriarchal, and the early agricultural societies that were settled, peaceful, and (perhaps) matriarchal. Now we're back to the noble savage approach to hunting societies that shoot deer by day and barbecue at night. As long as they can trade with the agriculturalists for beer, it's a redneck's backwoods paradise.

Otherwise it's a pretty persuasive argument. I'm just not sure I buy into the idea that you can measure quality of life and argue that one group is happier than another, or that the average quality of life is better for one group than another. Were the Vikings happier than the Egyptians? Were the Mongols better off than the Incans? Who can say?

My other issue is that we had the happy-go-lucky hunting lifestyle for hundreds of thousands of years. Basically for as long as we've existed as homo sapiens sapiens. But it's only in the last 10,000 years that we've had art, architecture, myth, literature, technology, etc., etc., all the way up to and including the computer I'm currently typing on. So how do we measure history against pre-history? Were people really better off before the invention of bread, football, and books?

Finally, Parfit's "repugnant conclusion" is just bizarre. He basically argues that it's better to be born than to not be born (pro-life) and therefore, larger populations are always preferable to smaller ones, even if it means that the a very large population is very poor and miserable and that a smaller population is better off and happy. So forget population control, forget education, forget medicine, forget technical advances, forget the environment, forget resource management, forget the water supply, forget global warming. What matters, according to this argument, is that every child not born, is a net social, moral, and ethical loss.

In other words, it's better to exist as gray goo than to be nothing at all.

But what I really think I see here is not a real representation of the historical past, but a desire for something better and different that might relieve the disastisfaction of our post-industrial now. It's a common temptation to want to escape the difficulties and limitations of our complex society for something simpler, something more pastoral, something more back to basics. In the industrial age, the ideal escape was back to the simplicities of the village and the farm. Now in the in the information age, we seem to be fantasizing about the happiness of pre-literature, pre-technological life, when all you needed to know was where the bison were and how to count 1, 2, or many.

Kierkegaard Quote

Here's the bit from Kierkegaard that Milch likes to quote (and as difficult as it is to read Kierkegaard, this does not seem like the best translation):

Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another. Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. Indeed, so far is it from being true that this second form of despair (despair at willing to be one’s own self) denotes only a particular kind of despair, that on the contrary all despair can in the last analysis be reduced to this. If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, does not talk about it meaninglessly as of something which befell him (pretty much as when a man who suffers from vertigo talks with nervous self-deception about a weight upon his head or about its being like something falling upon him, etc., this weight and this pressure being in fact not something external but an inverse reflection from an inward experience), and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair. The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it.

This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.

Agnostic Spiritualists?

Brandon Kumm bites off more than he can chew with an essay that tries to debunk religion and atheism in one rhetorical stab. His answer is something he calls rational spirtualism:

In reality there is no such thing as an atheist or an agnostic. There are only two camps of people: the spiritualists and the religious. The spiritualists are those who do not necessarily subscribe to the dogma and doctrine of a particular religion, although sometimes they do. They believe part of the dogma of a particular faith, but find the rest of that faith to be bunk. There are many spiritualists who call themselves Christians who would never enforce their particular belief system on anyone else. Those people are spiritualists at heart, not religious. Atheists, who purport not to believe in "god", also seem to have some spiritual grounding. A belief in something that they may not be able to even articulate, but that belief is there. Thus, they too are spiritualists, but of that most rational of bents.

There is so much wrong with his argument that it's hardly worth getting worked about it. Nevertheless, here's my quick rejoinder:

First, Atheists are not closet spiritualists. That divine spark that he's so excited about is something that atheists share in the form of secular humanism. This is the notion that ethical behavior between human beings can and should be based on our shared existence on this planet and our common hopes and fears. What he's calling spiritualism, is really just a form of irrational aestheticism - the placement of emotion above reason. I don't have a problem with emotion, but I do think it says more about our internal life as conscious beings that it does about the workings of the universe.*

Kumm also tries to use quantum weirdness to debunk the rationality of science, but this is really just a misuse and misunderstanding of quantum theory. I also don't think you can explain quantum weirdness by assigning emotional motivations to sub-atomic particles, however poetic that might be.

Secondly, Spiritualism refers to the 19th century religious belief that mediums could speak with the dead, so he really needs a new term. Talk about red flags. Unless seances, ghosts and ectoplasm really are part of his enlightened aesthetic world view.

More importantly, spiritualism as he describe it is essentially devoid of any content. It's fine for people to carry on in this fuzzy way about the power of faith and having a sense of a higher power, but what is it exactly? What is it they have faith in? Virgin births? Transmigration of souls? What exactly are they claiming? And if there are supernatural things that make up you belief system how is that different from the dogmatism of religion?

Finally, Atheists do not believe you can reference God, gods, or anything supernatural to explain natural phenomenon and that's pretty much the end of the story. They will acknowledge that scientific knowledge is always incomplete and highly improbable things are still possible, but that doesn't leave the door open for plainly impossible (and factually irrelevant) things like supernatural beings. Highly intelligent super-aliens? Maybe. Lovecraftian elder gods? They were aliens too after all. But not magic-man.

I understand the desire on Kumm's part to bring the rational and the emotional into balance, but it's important to remember that these are strictly human qualities and it would be a fallacy to try to project them onto the natural world. God did not create us in his image, and we should return the favor.

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* One of our basic human qualities is our ability to understand that other people have minds, emotions, and motivations. This helps us to socialize and interact in productive ways (there may be an evolutionary psychology argument to be made here but I won't go that far). I think this attribute has also allowed us to interpret mindfulness in the world around us even if there is none: in a rock, in a tree, in a mountain top, in an eagle, in a thunderstorm. God is our sense of mindfulness projected onto the entire universe. Religion is our attempt to socialize and interact with this greater mind in productive ways. But it's really just our psychology doing the work.