Yes, Religion DOES Need to Conform to (Broadly) Scientific Standards of Evidence

Breaking off from the philosophy of punishment, I wanted to talk about the philosophy of religion. A position that I’ve encountered a lot recently goes something like this:

“Considered by broadly scientific standards, as an explanatory hypothesis, belief in a personal, omnipotent, morally perfect God is irrational and unjustified. But those are the wrong standards to apply: theism is not an explanatory hypothesis, and treating it like a scientific claim misunderstands it.”

Now, I’m conflicted about this position. I think there’s a valuable point here, but I also think it’s presented in the opposite way that I would present it – it’s presented as a defense of religion against rationalistic criticism, whereas I would seek to use it to guide that criticism more effectively.

Because the thing is, I would be quite happy to accept that statements about God are best understood not as positing ‘one more entity’ alongside the other entities in the world, but rather as making some more complex sort of philosophical point. I think such an analysis would often bring out much of what was compelling and relevant in such claims.

For example, you might take the statement “we should all be grateful to God for His creation”, and say: ‘this looks like the same sort of statement as “Brian should be grateful to Sally for her help with revision”, i.e. the application of our standard notion of gratitude to a particular case. But actually, it’s a statement about that notion of gratitude itself, telling us that it needs to be applied in a certain way, that to be consistent we should extend a foundational sense of gratitude to all objects, rather than taking some as requiring gratitude, some as worthless, and some as deserved.’ Or something like that.

Similarly, statements that “God is with your everywhere” become statements about the application of our concept of solitude; “God moves in mysterious ways” becomes a statement about the application of our concept of mystery.

I would be quite happy to interpret claims about God in these kinds of ways. Except for a troublesome fact: this is not how religion usually presents them. Religion habitually and systematically offers these as claims about the existence of a distinct entity. In doing so, IT submits them to broadly scientific standards of evidence. And it has to do so, to remain recognisable as religion.

The Justification of Punishment: An Internal Critique of Retribution

In my last post I discussed why I thought that retributive theories of punishment should best be seen as aiming at a sort of ‘communication’, and that this might make them seem queer compared to other theories.

I realised that it might be worth saying more clearly what sort of communication I take retribution to be. In essence, the conversation I think is imagined to go like this: person X performs action A, and in doing so ‘says’ that action A is a reasonable to do (for them, on that occasion, at least). But! Action A is in fact ‘bad’, perhaps because it makes someone else die. Consequently person X’s initial ‘statement’ is false. By punishment, we do something ‘bad’ to person X (forcing them to become aware of some ‘badness’), and present this as directly tied to action A – so they now ‘perceive action A as bad’.

This account may seem very sloppy, but I don’t think it’s sloppier than the reality – the key concept here, after all, seems to be ‘bad’, which is not known for its precision. We can certainly attempt a critique of this, and I will in just a moment.

But first, notice how subtly different sorts of motivation can be very close to each other here. The punisher is motivated by a desire to ‘reaffirm’ that action A was bad, but this can be for a range of reasons. It might be out of concern for ‘moral law’ in the abstract, or for divine law. But it also might just be about personal status. Say action A is a form of ‘disrespect’ against me. The statement being made then (setting aside ambiguities of interpretation) is that I am not worthy of respect.

The motivation to ‘punish’ would then be not so much ‘moral’ as just a desire to affirm that I am worthy of respect. This is sometimes said pretty much literally: “I’ll teach you a lesson!” What lesson? “Nobody messes with Alderson Motherfucking Warm-Fork!” Is this motive ‘better’ or ‘worse’? An entirely open question – for the circumstances that make someone feel disrespected are so varied.

But let’s get to the point. Does this idea of the retributive ‘lesson’, which seeks to communicate to person X that ‘action A was bad’ by making it the cause of suffering for X, does it make any sense? Should it be endorsed?

The Real Basis of Punishment: Retribution as Communication

Imagine you’re discussing something with someone and then, just after you make a point that they think is foolish, they slap you in the face and tell you to stop being silly. Perhaps they jokingly wag their finger at you. Then they continue the discussion. What do you do?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I think one common reaction would be an outrage out of all proportion to the actual pain suffered, and based instead on a feeling of humiliation and disrespect. The desire this might produce could be expressed principally as ‘desire that things not go on as normal’. Maybe you slap them back, or shout at them, or leave immediately. In each case, the goal is (at least in part) to ‘mark’ the unacceptability of that action – or to put it another way, to ‘refute’ the ‘message’ that the action expressed, namely that it’s ok for this person to do that.

That is, the action taken in response would be not aimed at producing any effect, not at causal power, but would be communicative. Its rationale would be as part of an ongoing ‘discourse’ about how to act. If somebody watching had assumed that actions all ‘aim at ends’ in the sense of some result they produce, or was in another way committed to looking at actions as actions, and not as assertions, then they might well be confused, and find it hard to make sense of your response. What did it acheive?

This, I think, is what is often going on in discussions about ‘justifications for punishment’. There are broadly two sorts of theories about why we punish/why we should punish/whatever – I want to consider the debates without implying endorsement of any of their assumptions, let alone their real applications and history. Some say ‘it’s useful’ – whether by ‘deterrence’, ‘incapacitation’, or ‘rehabilitation’, it aims at some sort of good. The other says ‘it’s deserved’, or ‘it’s proportionate’ or ‘it’s justice’.

Logical Positivism is the Soviet Union of Philosophy

Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, murdered by a Nazi

I was discussing logical positivism with a group recently, and it occurred to me: logical positivism is the philosophical equivalent of the Soviet Union. This claim is not entirely facetious, though also not entirely non-facetious. This post, like many on this blog, is shockingly under-researched and no doubt quite plainly wrong.

(I should clarify that in both cases there should be an ‘etc.’ – the Soviet Union [mainly later but looking also at early figures like Lenin] along with the Stalinist states in China, Europe, Cuba, etc., and logical positivism/logical empiricism and the more general philosophical project emerging therefrom, including many people who would not have called themselves positivists – e.g. Quine, Wittgenstein both late and early, Ryle, the scientific behaviourists, etc.)

So why do I draw this parallel? There are a number of reasons.

Firstly, of course, while one is philosophical and the other political, the latter’s philosophy and the former’s politics align them quite closely. In essence, they largely share a belief in the desirability and feasibility of a socialist future, and a philosophical commitment to science and to naturalism. This is reflected in them having often similar enemies – notably, fascism and organised religion.

Secondly, just as obviously, they both offered bold and hugely ambitious projects for the total reconstitution of society or thought. They both, to be frank, failed in these projects, though their deaths were slow and drawn out, lingering on beyond the effective demise of their original animating enthusiasm.

What is the Opposite of Pleasure? Pain, Displeasure, and Ideology

A perhaps-inconsequential question of psychological philosophy: what is the opposite of pleasure?

There is a very long and very august tradition of answering ‘pain’. The idea that the pair of opposite, ‘pleasure and pain’, is a key feature of how our mental lives work can be found in (at least translations of) philosophers from Aristotle to Bentham.

However, this opposition is also very clearly false. It only takes a little reflection to realise that the oppositeof pleasure is displeasure, and that this is not identical with pain.

For a start, the whole point of speaking of ‘pleasure’ in general is the thought that of any sensation that feels ‘good’ (and thus makes us want to pursue it), it can therefore be called ‘pleasurable’ to precisely that extent. But the same isn’t true of pain.

If we say of any sensation that feels ‘bad’ that it feels ‘painful’ to that extent, we deny the possibility of distinguishing a sensation which is a pain from one which is an itch, tickle, discomfort, nausea, tiredness, etc. But clearly an itch and a pain feel different.

Secondly, pains can vary in how displeasurable they are. They are like a taste: the taste ‘salty’ can be pleasant at one time (because you’re craving it) and unpleasant at another time (because you want something sweet), without necessarily changing how salty it is. Moreover, it can change its saltiness in a simple way (say, increasing) and change its pleasantness in a more complex way (at first it’s nicer, then past a certain limit it becomes unpleasant).

Similarly, pain is a sensation; a certain pain can be more unpleasant when, for instance, uncontrolled, and less unpleasant when inflicted on oneself deliberately – but it need not be less or more painful. And a twice-as-intensely pain need not be only twice as unpleasant – it might be much more. Sometimes pain can make an experience more pleasant – the pain that indicates resistance or heightens awareness, the pain of spicy foods, strenuous exercise, or self-harm to combat a far more unpleasant feeling empty numbness.

Of course we can use ‘pain’ is a general term for displeasure, and to some extent this is common and natural. But we can also use ‘sweet’ as a general term for pleasure. Sounds are ‘sweet’, faces are ‘sweet’, air is ‘sweet’ when we’ve been holding our breath, water is ‘sweet’ when we’re desperately thirsty, etc.

But a philosopher who tried to speak of all sensations as being either ‘unpleasant, sweet, or neutral’ would clearly be an idiot – philosophers should aim for clear and precise language, not language that makes ‘this is unpleasantly sweet’ self-contradictory, or which makes ‘this is pleasantly sweet’ and ‘this is pleasantly savoury’ mean the same thing.

So why would smart people use such a misleading way of speaking? My suspicion is that it helps to make a certain picture look more robust – the picture that can be roughly called ‘psychological hedonism’, the claim that people are always (or for some definite class of cases – Kant was a psychological hedonist in a certain sense) motivated by ‘seeking pleasure and avoiding displeasure’. This simplifying picture rests on the terms ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure’ having definite and measurable meanings – and a sensation like pain is much more definite and measurable than displeasure, which is a property of sensations.

Making the hedonistic picture seem more meaningful and solid is to the advantage both of those who want to promote it (e.g. utilitarians) and of those who want to set it up and then attack it (e.g. Plato, Kant). Why would people want to do these things? That’s a big question, but my suspicion is that the answer would not be a noble truth-seeking philosophical one, but rather an ideological one, though of a complex nature. ‘Hedonism’, ‘pleasure-seeking’, has a strong ideological link, for example, with the body, emotion and irrationality. This is relevant both to class distinctions and to gender distinctions. But I’ll leave that hanging.

Foucault and Carnap on the Politics of Science

For unforeseen reasons, I have found myself reading extracts from the intellectual autobiography of Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the Vienna Circle and of the logical positivists, an early 20th-century philosophical movement that rejected as strictly meaningless all statements that could not be reduced to empirical science or to pure logic.

I came across his brief statement of the ethical and political beliefs that he felt the whole group had shared:

“[A]ll deliberate action presupposes knowledge of the world, that the scientific method is the best method of acquiring knowledge and that therefore science must be regarded as one of the most valuable instruments for the improvement of life.

It was and still is my conviction that the great problems of the organization of economy and the organization of the world at the present time, in the era of industrialization, cannot possibly be solved by “the free interplay of forces”, but require rational planning. For the organization of economy this means socialism in some form; for the organization of the world it means a gradual development toward a world government.

However, neither socialism nor world government are regarded as absolute ends; they are only the organizational means which, according to our present knowledge, seem to give the best promise of leading to…a form of life in which the well-being and the development of the individual is valued most highly, not the power of the state.

…we shall recognize the dangers lying in the constant increase in the power of the state; this increase is necessary because the national states must fuse into larger units and the states must take over many functions of the economy. Therefore it will be of prime importance to take care that the civil liberties and the democratic institutions are not merely preserved but constantly developed and improved.”

There’s a lot to comment on here, but it especially struck me because it reminded me of Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish‘, which I’ve also been reading recently. Foucault describes a process by which, starting around the later 18th century, institutions and habits of ‘discipline’, which were intimately connected to science, have appeared, spread, and become all-pervasive.

Two Concepts of Faith: When is it Rational to Suspend Reason?

In recent discussions centred on religion, the topic of ‘faith’ has come up a number of times, and in particular the move where it serves as a refuge from difficult arguments: even if the rational cards seem stacked against the truth of religious claims, the believer can remain steadfast in the name of faith – faith ‘above’ reason, or at least ‘against’ it.

Now, if someone wants to slap a certain set of noises onto a damn-fool concept, then they have the right to do so, and declare ‘by the word ‘monkey’ I intend to refer to triangles’. But they shouldn’t be allowed to make their use of the word appear more noble than it is by quietly appropriating the associations and positive (or negative) ‘baggage’ of an already-existing word, if their new definition has nothing in common with the existing definition.

So the question I find myself asking is, how does ‘faith’, as the term is used in religion, and in particular as used in this sort of defensive maneuvre, relate to the things we call ‘faith’ that aren’t about religion? Which requires us to ask – outside of religion, and setting the religious uses of the word entirely aside, what do we use the word ‘faith’ for?

What follows is not a systematic review of linguistic habits studied rigorously; it is a somewhat-considered attempt to summarise when this word would seem reasonable to me, when I (an ardent atheist) might find myself using it positively.

I would use it in cases where for some circumstantial reason, something seemed very strongly to be true, but where I had separately reached the opinion that those circumstances made my judgement unreliable. For example, if I were to have periodic episodes of depression, then it might be that at such times, because of changes in my mood, my patterns of attention and memory, my thinking patterns, and the stimuli I get exposed to, it seems overwhelmingly that life is not worth living – that is the only idea that feels real.

But I believe that my depressive brain thinks in a faulty way, and that in fact life is worth living – and I recall this belief during the depression, even while it seems in every way shallow, absurd, and unrealistic, because it cannot connect with how I’m actually able to reason.

To hold on to this belief, this resolution to keep living, takes ‘faith’.

Foucault, Humanitarianism and the Will-to-Power

This is the first post that’s coming out of my attempt to read ‘Discipline and Punish‘ by Michel Foucault. I want to start with the broadest idea of the book: an analysis of how our attitudes to and methods of punishment have changed in the emergence of modern society.

Foucault’s story is like this: in the previous ideology of punishment, the criminal appeared as something outside of and opposed to the social body – that social body being identified with the body of the king. The function of punishment was to reaffirm the superiority of the sovereign body over the criminal’s body by destroying it; the more complete the destruction, the more effective. Hence criminals taken out in public, tortured, dismembered, and finally executed.

In the currently ascendant ideology of punishment, the criminal appeared as always still a part of the social body, but a malfunctioning and diseased part (partly because the social body was now the nation and the people, not the sovereign). So now the function of punishment is to restore it to health – to strengthen and clean society.

Some key consequences of this new approach to punishment: that rather than seeking excess (after all, to rip off someone’s flesh with pincers, and kill them, and then string out their guts, is pretty excessive) it had to seek balance between two opposed imperatives. On the one hand, to attack and harm (after all, that’s what punishment is), but on the other, to respect and preserve the criminal (for they must eventually be returned to society in ‘mended’ form).

Secondly, knowledge of the criminal now becomes vital – detailed understanding so that they can be changed both inside and outside. This again tells against ‘excess’ and ‘violence’, because they might disrupt the collection of systematic data. The prison thus appears as the paradigm of punishment it preserves a symbolic ‘something’ about the prisoner that is not violated (they can keep their bodily integrity as long as they follow the regulations) and because its regimented, drawn-out nature allows for the collection of detailed information, the detailed composition of schedules and regulations, and the endeavour of trying to ‘fix’ the defective human being.

That’s how Foucault presents matters – and in many respects this account is not too different from the conventional liberal story. As society became more ‘civilised’, its efforts at punishment shifted away from being motivated by base motives of vengeance and cruelty, and came to embrace ‘humanitarian’ punishment that respected the ‘rights’ and ‘dignity’ of the criminal, along with seeking to ‘understand’ them so as to ‘rehabilitate’ them.

What is Politics? Crafts, Conflicts, and Oppression

Most of this blog is about ‘politics’ in one form or another. But it’s not entirely easy to say what identifies things as ‘political’. Sometimes the term is given a very wide definition (e.g. the making of decisions by groups) but that doesn’t seem much use – other times it’s defined quite narrowly (e.g. anything relating to the affairs of government), which also seems to miss what’s interesting.

A related question is why do politics? What is the point of it? I don’t think this would be the same for everyone. I do notice certain patterns though.

One view of ‘politics’ is sort of a generalisation from war – different groups are in conflict, and the important thing is simply to ensure that my side wins. Because we’re the best side, obviously.

Another view might be that ‘politics’ is a sort of craft – how can the ‘ship of state’ be most effectively ‘steered’? This can agree with the above that there’s a sort of constant ‘war’ going on, but it’s one in which ‘we’, the political-minded, are not engaged. Rather, we want to moderate, resolve, and generally control these conflicts so as to make things as peaceful as possible.

A particular flavour of this would be to treat ‘politics’ not as a practical but as an intellectual craft – the skill of best formulating hypothetical constitutions, say, or just of best understanding the ‘laws’ by which society progresses.

And finally, a last view of politics might be to see it principally in terms of ‘oppression’ – that is, as the first view said, there is a conflict going on, but it’s a conflict in which one side is systematically the aggressor against, and overall is ‘beating’ the other. The goal of politics is not to pick a side and back it, nor to keep this conflict under wraps, but to support the ‘oppressed’ in each case, with the goal not of having them triumph, but of reaching a point without oppression.

Obviously this isn’t all-or-nothing: most people will exhibit all of these at some point. For instance, the formation of rival parties, movements, ‘isms’, etc. means everybody will be drawing on the psychology of number 1 – my team is right, we have to fight the other team, they are bad. And there’s nothing wrong with that, within limits.

But I think it’s clear that there will also be fairly big variations, and that they will tend to relate to people’s actual political views. The primacy of the last one – politics as defined by the fact of systematic oppression, and as having the goal of ending that – is probably the best definition I can think of for ‘left-wing’.

What’s interesting is how people thinking in terms of one might view people thinking in terms of another. For example, it’s common to hear people from somewhere around the political centre complain that those on the far left ‘are entirely negative – they only know what they’re against, not what they’re for’. In part (in part), this may be due to the fact that those centrists are envisaging politics as a realm where ‘we’ (the politically active) are all basically on the same side, with the same goals (we all want to ‘make society better’, don’t we?) and are engaged in sharing advice about how to do that, even if sometimes we diagree.

But those unhelpful leftists are perhaps approaching politics more as a realm of struggle – and forces at war with each other don’t give each other advice. The focus might be less on identifying the right ‘plan’ and more on identifying the right ‘side’, and how to support it.

I think this can go too far, of course. Everything is best in moderation. But I also think it’s worth stating out loud: for me personally, I don’t approach politics primarily in terms of contributing to a shared ‘craft’, a body of knowledge either academic or practical – although that is, for example, the way that I generally approach philosophy, and the way that scientists, we might hope, generally approach science.

Rather, on this blog I primarily treat politics as something defined reactively, by the responses that are possible/necessary to the unfortunate fact of oppression.

Which is not to say, of course, that there is no such shared, non-conflictual ‘craft’ of how to organise people in society, at whatever scale. There is – but it’s quite different from most of ‘politics’ as usually understood, and in some ways it’s only been developed as a systematic discipline over the last century (or less). How to de-escalate situations, how to increase group creativity, how to avoid groupthink, how to stop people from feeling excluded, how to transmit information across networks rapidly, etc. In its intellectual aspect it might be called ‘social psychology’ – in its practical aspect, I’m not sure what to call it.

I don’t talk much about that, whatever it’s called. Primarily that’s because I’m quite useless at it, and can only suggest the absolute most basic and general principles of it (e.g. you’re more likely to get a decision to reflects everyone’s interests if everyone has a say in that decision). But it’s also because I don’t think it should be too hard – once we’ve turned our insane oppressive society into a sane one, and in doing so dissolved everything we would normally think of as ‘politics’.

The Ethics of Rebellion and Moderation: Values for Revolutionaries?

One of the ideas in yesterday’s post was the distinction between doing the sociology that supports political agitations towards socialism, and creating the ‘ideology’ (or perhaps, the ‘mythology’) that would preside over such a society, the values that it would understand itself in terms of.

I’ve recently been reading a very interesting book – Albert Camus’ ‘The Rebel’ (subtitled ‘an essay on man in revolt’), and I think one of its major goals is, in a certain sense, to lay out what is essentially an ‘ideology’ in that sense – what I will call ‘the ideology of rebellion and moderation’. So I thought I’d devote a post to talking about it, because I like it.

A few words about what I mean by ‘ideology’. I don’t mean a set of detailed political principles or analyses, but something like an overall view of the world, of how to act, of what has value. In that sense, we might say, modern ideology contains such ideas as ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and ‘reason’ – which can be appropriated and used in very different ways by different particular movements (though not in absolutely any way). Religions often provide similarly ‘ideological’ terms (‘faith’, ‘sin’), which are also very flexible in practice. Ideology in this sense is generally something that links together how people understand 1) their own personal lives and actions, 2) their society and its politics, and 3) the universe and human history as a whole. It’s probably closer to an ethical code than a theory of any kind. To a certain extent it will always be a tissue of obviousness, truisms, and cliches.

Critics of ideology might describe it as the lies that a society tells itself, and they’re right in that ideology is generally 1) not strictly true – though also not strictly false, nor strictly arbitrary, and 2) useful to established interests (because if it wasn’t, they’d get it changed). But on the other hand, it seems clear to me that it’s not something that can be dispensed with, and the ideology of a supposedly ‘non-ideological’, ‘scientific’ movement (turns disapproving eye on USSR) is liable to just be bad, veiled, ideology.

So – what is the ideology of rebellion and moderation? It says

-that the experience of rebellion, an ‘essential dimension of human nature’, is the best revelation of human dignity – of ‘that part of man that must always be defended’,

-that this dignity is something shared by all humans,

-that the fact that we share our rebellion, that we defy the same fate and the same order and the same unjust world, reminds us of our community with each other.

– and that to stay true to itself, this value that rebellion reveals must be understood as ‘moderation’.