One of the problems with belonging to a faction that’s convinced it’s on the winning side of intellectual history is that it becomes easy to persuade oneself that one’s own worldview has no weak points whatsoever, no internal contradictions or ragged edges, no cracks through which a critic’s wedge could end up driven. This kind of overconfidence has been displayed, at various points in the human story, by everyone from millenarians to Marxists, inquisitors to eugenicists. But right now its vices are often found in a certain type of atheistic polemicist, and in a style of anti-religious argument that’s characterized by a peculiar, almost-willed ignorance of why reasonable people might doubt the scientific-materialist worldview.
A case in point: The University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne’s response, republished by The New Republic, to my Christmas column on the various modern American world-pictures and what each one owes to the scene in Bethlehem. That column took a concluding dig at secular naturalism, for which Coyne is a prominent evangelist, suggesting that its view of the cosmos — a purposeless, purely physical universe, in which human life is accidental, human history directionless, and human consciousness probably an illusion — is at odds with its general political and moral posture (liberal, egalitarian, right-based, progressive) in ways that make the entire world-picture ripe for reassessment or renovation. So it’s entirely fair that Coyne took the opportunity to deliver some body blows to theism and Christianity in return.
What’s striking about his response, though, is the extent to which its own account of the secular, materialist world-picture actually illustrates precisely the problems and tensions that I was talking about, in ways that even a casual reader should find obvious but which Coyne apparently did not. He can see the weak points in a religious argument, but the weaknesses of his own side of the debate are sufficiently invisible to him that his rebuttal flirts with self-caricature.
Let me offer two examples. First, to the idea that the materialist’s purposeless cosmos poses some problems for the liberal view (or any view) of moral and political purpose in human affairs, Coyne responds:
I’m not sure what Douthat means when he says “cosmology does not harmonize at all” with the moral picture of secularism. Cosmology doesn’t give one iota of evidence for a purpose (it could!) or for God. Most of the universe is cold, bleak, airless, and uninhabitable. In fact, such a cosmology harmonizes far better with a secular moral picture than a religious one. Secularists see a universe without apparent purpose and realize that we must forge our own purposes and ethics, not derive them from a God for which there’s no evidence.
Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created by a transcendent being for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem dark and nihilistic. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real. Right now my purpose is to write this piece, and then I’ll work on a book I’m writing, and later I’ll have dinner with a friend. Soon I’ll go to Poland to visit more friends. Maybe later I’ll read a nice book and learn something. Soon I’ll be teaching biology to graduate students. Those are real purposes, not the illusory purposes to which Douthat wants us to devote our only life.
So Coyne’s vision for humanity here is heroic, promethean, quasi-existentialist: Precisely because the cosmos has no architect or plan or underlying purpose, we are free to “forge” our own purposes, to “make” meaning for ourselves, to create an ethics worthy of a free species, to seize responsibility for our own lives and codes and goals rather than punting the issue to some imaginary skygod. (Ayn Rand could not have put it better.) And these self-created purposes have the great advantage of being really, truly real, whereas the purposes suggested by religion are by definition “illusory.”
Well and good. But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary.
It’s true that even if the conscious self is an illusion, human beings would still have purposes in the sense that any organism has purposes, and our movements — all that travel and reading and dining, in Coyne’s case — wouldn’t just be random or indeterminate. But just as nobody would describe a tree growing toward the sun or a bee returning to the hive as “forging their own purposes” in life, so too Coyne’s promethean language about human agency implies a much higher conception of what a human being IS — both in terms of the reality of consciousness and the freedom afforded to it — than his world-picture will allow.
Obviously the foregoing is not the end of the argument: There are many talented philosophers who have spent their careers trying to iron out this particular kink in the eliminative-materialist fabric, or explaining why it’s not actually a major kink at all, and there’s no reason why you should take a newspaper columnist’s side against their formidable qualifications. But the point is that if you’re going to argue about this, with a newspaper columnist or anyone, you have to actually make the argument; you can’t just blithely assert what looks like contradiction and claim to be defending science and reason against the obscurantism of religion. Or rather, you can – but you won’t make your side look particular good.
Then further down, here’s Coyne on the morals of a materialist:
As for where altruism comes from, who knows? My own suspicions are that it’s partly genetic and partly cultural, but what’s important is that we feel it and can justify it. I can justify it on several grounds, including that altruism makes for a more harmonious society, helps those in need, and, as a selfish motive, that being altruistic gains you more respect. None of this justification has anything to do with God.
Again, if this is the scientific-materialist’s justification for morality, then the worldview has even more problems than I suggested. Coyne proposes three arguments in favor of a cosmopolitan altruism, two of which are circular: Making a “harmonious society” and helping “those in need” are reasons for altruism that presuppose a certain view of the moral law, in which charity and harmony are considered worthwhile and important goals. (If my question is, “what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?” saying “because it’s egalitarian!” is not much of an answer.)
The third at least seems to have some kind of Darwinian-ish, quasi-scientific logic, but among other difficulties it’s an argument that only holds so long as the altruistic choice comes at a relatively low cost: If you’re a white Southerner debating whether to speak out against a lynching party or a Dutch family contemplating whether to hide your Jewish neighbors from the SS, the respect factor isn’t really in play — as, indeed, it rarely is in any moral dilemma worthy of the name. (And of course, depending on your ideas about harmony and stability, Coyne’s “harmonious society” argument might also seem like a case against opposing Jim Crow or anti-Semitism — because why rock the boat on behalf of a persecuted minority when stability and order are the greater goods?)
The point that critics make against eliminative-materialism, which Coyne seems not to grasp, is that it makes a kind of hard-and-fast moral realism logically impossible — because if the only real thing is matter in motion, and the only legitimate method of discernment the scientific method, you’ll never get to an absolute “thou shalt not murder” (or “thou shalt risk your life on behalf of your Jewish neighbor”) now matter how cleverly you think and argue. This is not necessarily a theistic objection — it’s one of the issues raised in Thomas Nagel’s controversy-generating book, which explicitly keeps religious ideas at arm’s length — and for that matter there are forms of theism that need not imply moral realism, and Euthyphro-style objections to the union of the two. But I don’t think those of us who still embrace the traditional Western idea of God are crazy to suggest that our cosmology has at least a surface compatibility with moral realism that the materialist conception of the universe’s (nonexistent) purposes seems to lack.
So if you’re going to defend both materialism and modern rights-based liberalism, you have to actually address this point head-on. Make a case for a more limited, non-metaphysical form of moral realism, make a more thoroughgoing attempt to discern some sort of moral teleology in the Darwinian story (though of course Coyne has denounced efforts along these lines as “creationism for liberals”), go full relativist and make a purely aesthetic case for cosmopolitanism, I don’t care what — but give me something that doesn’t either beg the question (“we should help people because it helps people!”) or pretend that there are actually solid selfish reasons for the most costly, heroic, and plainly self-sacrificial forms of non-self-interested behavior.
Finally, I enjoyed Coyne’s parting sally:
Douthat is wrong. The cracks are not in the edifice of secularism, but in the temples of faith. As he should know if he reads his own newspaper, secularism is not cracking up but growing in the U.S. He and his fellow religionists are on the way out, and his columns are his swan song. It may take years, but one fine day our grandchildren will look back on people like Douthat, shake their heads, and wonder why some people couldn’t put away their childish things.
For a man who believes in “a physical and purposeless universe” with no room for teleology, Coyne seems remarkably confident about what direction human history is going in, and where it will end up. For my part, I don’t make any pretense to know what ideas will be au courant a hundred years from now, and as I said in the column, I think there are all kinds of worldviews that could gain ground — at the expense of my own Catholicism and secular materialism alike. (Right now, the territory around pantheism and panpsychism seems ripe for further population, but that’s just a guess.) But I suppose it’s a testament to my own childish faith in the “neuronal illusion” that is the human intellect that I can’t imagine a permanent intellectual victory for a worldview as ill-served by its popularizers as atheism is by Jerry Coyne.
Ross Douthat
Note by Wissai:At his own New York Times opinion blog, Ross Douthat has responded to my New Republic column criticizing his ownChristmas column. In that piece, Douthat dismissed secularism as a "rope bridge flung across a chasm" that "wafts into a logical abyss."
He further claimed that there were serious cracks in materialism—cracks illustrated by philosopher Thomas Nagel's unwarranted claims for a teleological force in evolution, as well as by Steven Weinberg's correct claim that we don't yet understand everything about physics. These comprised Douthat's sole evidence that the materialist paradigm is about to disintegrate.
In his new piece, “The confidence of Jerry Coyne," Douthat continues his cluelessness by trying to show that my materialism is inconsistent in two respects and overly confident in another. His arguments:
1. IF I THINK THE "SELF" IS AN ILLUSION, I HAVE NO JUSTIFICATION FOR SAYING THAT I HAVE A PURPOSE:
So Coyne’s vision for humanity here is heroic, Promethean, quasi-existentialist: Precisely because the cosmos has no architect or plan or underlying purpose, we are free to “forge” our own purposes, to “make” meaning for ourselves, to create an ethics worthy of a free species, to seize responsibility for our own lives and codes and goals rather than punting the issue to some imaginary skygod. (Ayn Rand could not have put it better.) And these self-created purposes have the great advantage of being really, truly real, whereas the purposes suggested by religion are by definition “illusory.”
Well and good. But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly—because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit?
Douthat somehow sees this as a "contradiction." Apparently his notion of "purpose" involves something given by Almighty God, and therefore whatever comes from the atheistic collection of neurons that calls itself “Jerry Coyne” cannot apprehend a purpose.
But of course Jerry Coyne does exist as an identifiable physical entity that feels itself to be an agent. True, that agency is an illusion: That is, it’s not what it seems to be. There is no little person in my brain that directs my thoughts and activities. There is no “Coyne soul" separate from my neurons, nor is there a “Douthat soul." But there still is a human being that bears my name and has desires and feelings different from those of other beings. These are certainly as "real" as any of Douthat’s emotions. Before we accept Douthat’s God-given “purpose” as more real than mine, I submit that he should provide some hard evidence for his God’s existence.
Further, I maintain, as do many philosophers and neuroscientists, that our sense of agency is a remarkable illusion confected by evolution through the arrangement of our neurons. It may well have been a feature that was evolutionarily advantageous—a product of natural selection. And that evolved collection of molecules, with its sense of agency, takes pleasure in certain activities and feels that it has goals. That those feelings and goals are an inexorable product of our genes and environments is discomfiting to some, but that's where the evidence points. And while our goals are more complicated than those of, say, a squirrel, whose "purpose" is to reproduce, gather nuts, and bask in the sun, they all come down to whatever motivates an evolved organism—from the simple goals of simple organisms to the complex goals of complex organisms with intricate brains.
Douthat doesn't like this because he accepts only those purposes bestowed by a celestial deity. But there's simply no evidence for such a thing. He wants there to be more than materialism, but there's no evidence for that, either. We have no need of such hypotheses, except as childish deBut there's simply no evidence for such a thing. He wants there to be more than materialism, but there's no evidence for that, either. We have no need of such hypotheses, except as childish desires for father figures, afterlives, and goals that we’re too lazy to forge for ourselves.
2. IF WE ARE EVOLVED BEINGS, THEN THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR BEING MORAL.
Douthat:
Coyne proposes three arguments in favor of a cosmopolitan altruism, two of which are circular: Making a “harmonious society” and helping “those in need” are reasons for altruism that presuppose a certain view of the moral law, in which charity and harmony are considered worthwhile and important goals. (If my question is, “what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?” saying “because it’s egalitarian!” is not much of an answer.)
The third at least seems to have some kind of Darwinian-ish, quasi-scientific logic, but among other difficulties it’s an argument that only holds so long as the altruistic choice comes at a relatively low cost: If you’re a white Southerner debating whether to speak out against a lynching party or a Dutch family contemplating whether to hide your Jewish neighbors from the SS, the respect factor isn’t really in play—as, indeed, it rarely is in any moral dilemma worthy of the name. (And of course, depending on your ideas about harmony and stability, Coyne’s “harmonious society” argument might also seem like a case against opposing Jim Crow or anti-Semitism—because why rock the boat on behalf of a persecuted minority when stability and order are the greater goods?)
The first two arguments are not at all circular, but the results of reasoning and evolution.
I've often said that I don't know how much of human morality comes from natural selection's instilling in us certain behaviors and feelings, and how much is due to reason. But I am virtually certain that none of it is due to God.
I want to live in a world where people are treated fairly and in which, wereI disadvantaged, people would try to help me. For it is only an accident of biology and history that has made me better off than others. I want to live in a world where people promote the well-being of our fellows. That is what I see as "moral” behavior. This kind of morality is justified by its results, but one thing it is not is circular. (Indeed, it is Douthat’s morality that is circular, for it ultimately rests on what he thinks God wants, and unless Douthat can further justify why God wants such behavior, that’s the end of the road.) Like all nonreligious brands of morality, mine comes down to a justified preference: a judgment call.
But it's better to make a judgment call based on science, observation, and reason than on the dictates of an imaginary being. We are evolved social animals who have been bequeathed big brains by natural selection, and we can reason about what kind of society we want. The answer to why we should be altruistic or compassionate is not "because it's egalitarian," but because it makes for a better and more harmonious world. And, at any rate, Douthat’s answering "Why be altruistic?" with "Because God wants it” is, to any thinking person, a blatant evasion.
As for "stability and order" being the greatest goods, I don’t accept that and never have. We now realize that if one buys such stability at the cost of disenfranchising groups of people for no good reason, it creates a society in which the disorder remains, but is hidden and suppressed. The instability, disorder, and dysfunctionality persist in the disenfranchised, reducing society’s well-being. Finally, not all evolved "moral intuitions" are useful in today's world, for we no longer live in the small social groups that dominated more than 99% of our evolutionary history. Xenophobia, for instance, may be one such vestigial behavior.
3. I'M TOO CONFIDENT ABOUT THE ULTIMATE VICTORY OF SECULAR REASON.
Douthat:
Finally, I enjoyed Coyne’s parting sally:
"Douthat is wrong. The cracks are not in the edifice of secularism, but in the temples of faith. As he should know if he reads his own newspaper, secularism is not cracking up but growing in the U.S. He and his fellow religionists are on the way out, and his columns are his swan song. It may take years, but one fine day our grandchildren will look back on people like Douthat, shake their heads, and wonder why some people couldn’t put away their childish things." [ITALICS ADDED]
For a man who believes in “a physical and purposeless universe” with no room for teleology, Coyne seems remarkably confident about what direction human history is going in, and where it will end up. For my part, I don’t make any pretense to know what ideas will be au courant a hundred years from now, and as I said in the column, I think there are all kinds of worldviews that could gain ground—at the expense of my own Catholicism and secular materialism alike. (Right now, the territory around pantheism and panpsychism seems ripe for further population, but that’s just a guess.) But I suppose it’s a testament to my own childish faith in the “neuronal illusion” that is the human intellect that I can’t imagine a permanent intellectual victory for a worldview as ill-served by its popularizers as atheism is by Jerry Coyne.
Of course Douthat doesn't really conceive of his faith as childish, as he’s apparently proud of it. If that’s the case, then by all means let him give us the reasons for his belief, and tell us why he's so sure that his Catholicism is the "right" religion rather than, say, Islam. For, if he's chosen wrong there, he'll face an eternity of fire.
All I know is what I see and what I discern from history and the patterns so thoroughly documented in Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature. What I see is a trend in human behavior that, while not completely smooth, arcs toward an appreciation for the sufferings of others, whether those others be women, gays, minorities, children, or animals. And religion, which has often opposed this trend, is clearly on the wane. It was unthinkable to not be religious in sixteenth-century Europe, but in many parts of Europe belief in God is now a minority view. It is hard to imagine that, at least in Western countries, we will ever see the return of child labor, institutionalized slavery, or public torture. It’s equally hard to imagine that Douthat's Catholic Church could, as it once did, put heretics on the rack. Or does he think that a new Inquisition is just as likely as the demise of Catholicism?
Of course it will take many decades to dispel the delusion of gods, but I remain optimistic that the lack of evidence for divinity will ultimately overcome wishful thinking. "Pantheism" is often just another word for "atheism," and panpsychism—the view that mind permeates the universe—seems silly, even if it's touted by Thomas Nagel.
In the end, Douthat, like many, is simply uncomfortable with a materialist worldview, and wants desperately for there to be More Than That. He yearns for a teleological or divine force that, he thinks, will give our lives real purpose and meaning, and ground human morality. But doesn’t the lack of evidence for such a force disturb him a bit? If it doesn't, he's not thinking.
Because I’m getting really tired of debates with weak combatants.
I’m not an atheist myself, but I’m particularly skeptical of Douthat’s “morality-has-no-foundation-without-God” style of argument for religion, so I’ll enter the lists on the opposing side for the moment.
On the illusory self: the use of the word “illusion” is exceptionally confusing, and I wish cognitive philosophers would come up with another term – though I do suspect there’s an inherent problem with language here in that we don’t really know what we’re talking about.
There’s a huge amount of evidence that what we think of as the “self” – a homunculus sitting behind our eyeballs – is an incorrect picture of reality. The integrative self breaks down as a consequence of a variety of physical traumas and maladies; neuronal activity related to willed action precedes any conscious “intention” to act; artists from antiquity have attested to the experience of “inspiration,” the feeling that our most creative acts originate outside of ourselves. Apart from all this, the homunculus notion never made sense in its own terms. Who’s sitting behind the homunculus’s eyeballs, pulling the levers of his will? Where is the ghost in the ghost in the machine?
But an “illusion” is what happens when you perceive something that isn’t actually there. It’s an artifact of perception – and hence implies an entity doing the perceiving. The whole point of the argument that the self is “an illusion” is to say that there is no such entity. Consciousness cannot literally be an illusion because illusions can only be perceived by conscious entities. A rock cannot be deluded.
I don’t have a solution to this linguistic problem. Note that the problem is not a knock-down argument against materialism. There are materialist mysterians and materialist panpsychists – Roger Penrose, for example. And who’s to say that trees [I couldn't just delete that particular typo - it's too much fun] Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett and the rest of them may be right that the key to the puzzle of human consciousness is the ability to model other minds, which results in an ability to model one’s own mind, reflect on one’s own mental state, and thereby achieve a different kind of consciousness than other animals have. But there a huge leap from “they’re onto something” to “they’ve explained consciousness,” and an even bigger leap from there to “they’ve explained consciousness away.”
In any event, none of this is necessary to the atheist/materialist argument about morality.
So what is that argument? Well, I can’t speak for Coyne, but if I were structuring one, it would be a blend of existentialism, evolutionary psychology, Aristotle and Mill.
We are, in fact, responsible for making our own purposes in the world – Douthat as well, inasmuch as he is actually free to accept or reject Christianity, in whole or in part. Nobody can actually constrain his conscience but himself. Existentialism in this sense is descriptive, not prescriptive. A smug atheist would say that Douthat’s response to that reality is to choose a master whom he thinks will take good care of him. Douthat might bristle at that – but how is he to argue with someone who made a more Stoical choice, choosing to master himself?
Evolutionary psychology comes in to explain why some kind of morality is natural, since we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis (but which, I cannot stress enough, Aristotle thought was scientific – I feel pretty confident that, were he alive today, Aristotle would be making precisely the same move). But much of the edifice of Aristotle’s ethics can be readily re-built on a Darwinian foundation. Now we have a theory of virtue and human flourishing, and an ethics to promote same within society. Between Aristotle and the neo-Darwinians, we’ve also probably got a Burkean bias towards existing institutions and arrangements and a preference for spontaneous order over imposed rules.
This leaves Mill, who we’ll bring in because we want to come to liberal conclusions (as Coyne does; I see nothing wrong with reasoning from conclusion back to premise, provided one knows that this is what one is doing; the argument is as strong or as weak no matter which end you start from). The thing about Mill is that he’s also readily assimilable to a Darwinian-Aristotealian framework. Mill’s liberalism isn’t terribly wedded to Lockean foundations; it’s very pragmatic, and more wedded to a notion of liberal virtues than to a notion of liberal rights. “Do unto others” is a very old, a very widely accepted ethical principle – no doubt the evolutionary psychologists have a ready just-so story as to why. Mill builds much of his edifice on that very comfortable foundation. What I also like about Mill is that he provides us with a model for a liberal hero, someone who is the exemplar of the liberal virtues as surely as a Christian saint is an exemplar of the Christian virtues or Achilles is the exemplar of the Homeric virtues.
Is that going to convince everybody? Is it going to satisfy everybody’s yearnings? Is everybody going to aspire to be a liberal hero? Of course not. But in case he didn’t notice, Douthat’s own church hasn’t yet convinced everybody, and hasn’t satisfied everybody. Will it assure that everybody behaves morally? No again – but, not to beat the same drum too hard, Douthat doesn’t have an empirical theory. He can’t prove that Christianity makes people less-likely to commit murder, all else being equal. He hasn’t even tried to demonstrate that.
But why be moral? If the universe has no point, and human beings are not here for a reason, why not be a hedonist? Or worse – a sociopath?
I’m always mystified by this question from theists. Douthat complains that Coyne’s argument is circular: “If my question is ‘what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?’ saying, ‘because it’s egalitarian!’ is not much of an answer.” But his own argument is equally circular: secular liberalism is “unjustified” because it lacks a foundation in belief in God, but a belief in God is “justified” because without it you don’t have a foundation for morality! I don’t know about Douthat, but I suspect that, at least some of the time, what I’m really hearing with this kind of argument is a species of Straussianism. To whit: yes, I know, and you know, that there isn’t really any arguing with a cold and empty cosmos. But most people can’t handle that kind of truth; they need to believe that there’s an objective meaning to their lives. So, for the sake of the greater good, we have to affirm publicly that there is such a thing, that God is the foundation of morality. I’ve always suspected that Strauss would have got on just fine with the Grand Inquisitor; in any event I’ve never liked this line of argument.
I appreciate that Rod Dreher, who also makes arguments like the above that I don’t have much use for, often takes a more personal turn, talking about how he experienced Christianity as salvation from a state of being that now fills him with some mixture of sadness and disgust. I understand that kind of argument – or, better, testimony. And I don’t see how the arguments of someone like Coyne would have any impact on it. What would he say – that the experience wasn’t real? Meaning what – that Dreher didn’t actually experience it? No – the heart of any “demystification” would be that Dreher was not supposed to allow that kind of experience to affect him deeply. To which I would say: what’s the argument within your secular morality for that attitude toward life, and towards one’s experiences?
I don’t think there is any such argument. But I also don’t think the attitude is simply smug social prejudice. There’s a masculinist tinge to some of the smugger atheists that I think deserves closer examination. And I think that affects the arguments of the more articulate theists to their detriment. What, after all, is the problem with arguing from experience, talking about one’s own soul’s longings? The problem, I suspect, is partly that it all sounds rather feminine.
Much better to be able to say: no, my arguments are objective, they have logical coherence, they are properly justified, they rest on firm foundations – it is you who are deluded, dancing in the air. That’s a properly masculine approach to reality, and we want our religion to be real in the way that would command masculine respect. We don’t just want our Christian heroes; we want them to kick Achilles’s primitive ass.
Much better. Pity it isn’t true.
Tagged Aristotle, atheism, Charles Darwin, Christianity, consciousness, Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, evolutionary psychology, Existentialism, Jerry Coyne, John Stuart Mill, materialism, religion,Roger Penrose, Ross Douthat, theism. By Ross Douthat on 1/13/2014
I began last week by responding to Jerry Coyne’s broadside against my Christmas column, so I suppose it’s fitting to begin this one by responding to Noah Millman’s lamentthat I need to “argue with better atheists,” instead of “weak combatants” like Coyne. My facile response to that line is that I’ll argue with better atheists when America’s flagship journal of liberal opinion publishes better atheists attacking things I’ve written; my more serious response is that my quarrel with atheism grows cooler and more modest the more serious (in my admittedly-biased view) the atheist in question. I’ll elaborate on that a bit below, but first, here’s Millman’s more serious complaint about my response to Coyne:
I’m not an atheist myself, but I’m particularly skeptical of Douthat’s “morality-has-no-foundation-without-God” style of argument for religion, so I’ll enter the lists on the opposing side for the moment …
Douthat complains that Coyne’s argument is circular: “If my question is ‘what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?’ saying, ‘because it’s egalitarian!’ is not much of an answer.” But his own argument is equally circular: secular liberalism is “unjustified” because it lacks a foundation in belief in God, but a belief in God is “justified” because without it you don’t have a foundation for morality! I don’t know about Douthat, but I suspect that, at least some of the time, what I’m really hearing with this kind of argument is a species of Straussianism. To whit: yes, I know, and you know, that there isn’t really any arguing with a cold and empty cosmos. But most people can’t handle that kind of truth; they need to believe that there’s an objective meaning to their lives. So, for the sake of the greater good, we have to affirm publicly that there is such a thing, that God is the foundation of morality. I’ve always suspected that Strauss would have got on just fine with the Grand Inquisitor; in any event I’ve never liked this line of argument.
Nor have I, and I’m happy to clarify this point, because it’s crucial to my disagreement with Coyne and many other new-atheist polemicists. I would not, emphatically not, justify a belief in God on the grounds that without it you don’t have a foundation for morality. My argument is more limited: I’m proposing that a belief in God and a belief in moral realism — and, by extension, a belief in ideas like the rights-based liberalism on which our civilization is founded — form a coherent world-picture in a way that the combination of eliminative materialism and rights-based liberalism does not. That is to say, I think certain religious premises, and particularly the premises of classical theism, provide an explanation of what the moral law is, its sources and its requirements, and its relationship to the universe, to human consciousness and to the way we organize society that make much more internal sense than the various attempts to defend the claims of egalitarian liberalism based on Jerry Coyne’s strictly naturalist premises about the universe and human beings’ place in it.
I won’t defend this proposition at length here, except to say that if you read Thomas Nagel’s critique of eliminative materialism and David Bentley Hart’s defense of classical theism back to back, you’ll get a pretty good sense of where I’m coming from. But I want to stress that I’m not saying that “coherence” is the same thing as “truth” (or, for that matter, the same thing as “answers all objections completely persuasively”), or that anyone who finds my critique of Coyne persuasive should rush to be received into their local branch of Christendom. The plausible intellectual connection between theism and a theory of inalienable human rights could be a spur to conversion in an individual case — as it was, for instance, for W.H. Auden, who found himself impelled back toward Christian belief in part by his reaction to the Nazis. But there are plenty of other moves one could make instead. Indeed, as I tried to stress both in my original column and the post replying to Coyne, I think there are many potentially coherent world-pictures — which means that there are various ways that modern secular progressives could make their principles make a little more sense without returning to their ancestors’ biblical faith.
Some of these paths to coherence are deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic — and some of them, yes, are atheistic or agnostic. They just aren’t atheistic in the particular style of the new-atheist crowd, with its peculiar mix of overconfident reductionism and crowing self-righteousness about morality and politics. Instead, the atheisms I have in mind are either more agnostic about the nature of human subjectivity and modern science’s ability to plumb its depths (like Nagel and some of the so-called New Mysterians), more skeptical about liberal humanism’s pieties (like that rampaging pessimist John Gray, or Matthew McConaughey’s eliminative-materialist policeman on H.B.O.’s new miniseries “True Detective”), or both.
When such atheists are liberal moralists, they’re usually open to grounding their moralism in theories about the cosmos (panpsychism, teleology in evolution, etc.) that today’s regnant naturalism disallows; when they’re strict materialists, they’re usually more inclined to the variations on stoicism, pessimism, epicureanism and ironism that seem to me to follow logically (to the extent that anything does) from that understanding of the world. And in neither case, crucially, are they inclined to lecture religious believers on our benighted, historically-foredoomed failure to embrace the synthesis of scientism and progressive moral certainty, because they see that synthesis’s problems just as clearly as we do.
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Meanwhile, regarding Millman’s critique of what he calls the Straussian attitude toward the utility of religious belief, I think it’s useful to distinguish between two potential postures toward religion that a sympathetic skeptic might take. In the first case, the skeptic finds himself in possession of a deep-seated moral absolutism on certain questions that seems to only make sense in a divinely-ordered cosmos, yet remains otherwise intellectually unconvinced of the case that this divine ordering actually exists. Or, alternatively, she finds herself in need of a Higher Power or Purpose in her own life — like many people entering Alcoholics Anonymous, say — without necessarily being suddenly convinced that this Power is really out there. Such a person might then to decide to live as if a religious tradition is correct — to practice without assent, to speak the words without full belief. And this, I think, is perfectly defensible, because it basically represents a form of exploration, a way of testing (perhaps the only way of testing, depending on your ideas about religion) a proposition that you find doubtful but appealing, an attempt to gain knowledge that might help smooth out the contradictions in your understanding of the world. If someone in the midst of that kind of skepticism-infused experimentation were forced to suddenly elaborate a complete world-picture, they might end up sounding as incoherent as I think the new atheists often sound. But with this crucial difference: They would be aware of the tensions, aware of the difficulties, and accepting them as a hopefully-temporary part of a personal process, rather than claiming to have arrived at a permanent intellectual solution and proselytizing ardently on its behalf.
Which is, I think, where the second of attitude comes in, and why it’s so problematic. The “churchgoing skeptic,” as described above, is someone who embraces religion experimentally in the hopes of harmonizing his own contradictory instincts and beliefs. The “religion as a noble lie” attitude that Millman is critiquing, on the other hand, is all about other people: This kind of “pro-religion” skeptic is pretty confident that he knows the score, and he’s just worried about what might happen if everybody else knows it. So instead of conducting experiments to test his own beliefs and ideas, he’s demanding — or suggesting, quietly, to people in positions of influence — that the religious portion of society be encouraged to stop experimenting with theirs.
I don’t want to say that there’s always a bright line between “skeptical churchgoing” and the “noble lie” school of thought — one can attend mass exclusively pour encourager les autres, and (at a more subconscious level) one can want other people to remain religious so that one always has the option of making one’s own experiment in faith. (Garry Wills, in his post-Vatican II book, “Bare Ruined Choirs,” has some interesting things to say about philo-Catholics of this sort, who liked the air of timeless certainty around the pre-conciliar church precisely because they felt like it kept real religion going in case they ever wanted to dabble in it.)
But taken on its own, the “noble lie” attitude offers a form of support that actual believers should reject. Given non-religious premises, there are various defenses of this perspective that one can make, and the more Machiavellian ones — in which religion really is the opiate of the masses, and that’s a good thing, because popular piety preserves the skeptic’s own social position, intellectual freedom, etc. — have a certain grim consistency that’s lacking in the naively anti-religious sincerity of the new atheists. But believers should still prefer the thundering anathemas of Coyne and Co. to the subtleties of some of religion’s atheistic defenders: Better a sincere enemy, in the end, than a conscious liar who calls himself a friend.
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