Wednesday, May 2, 2012

On "Meta-Atheism" and Georges Rey

Our old friend Peter Boghossian recently posted a link to this short article from 2000, bearing the title Meta-Atheism, by Georges Rey who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Why this old article is circulating I'm not sure, especially since it doesn't go much beyond Freud's standard account of religious belief as wishful thinking, only adding some particulars to the observation, but there it is.

The "meta-atheism" the title refers to is Rey's claim that "despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." This is a formulation of the de jure objection to religious belief which Alvin Plantinga deals with thoroughly in his Warranted Christian Belief (in which Plantinga rigorously demonstrates why none of the de jure objections, in their various formulations, actually work as objections).

Be that as it may, it certainly isn't controversial to suggest that if God is not real, or there is no supernatural reality, that therefore religious belief is a product of wishful thinking or self-deception. That's obviously true, operating on that conditional. Indeed, even if God does exist and one religion is True, it still may be true that other instances of religious belief in other gods are products of these mental processes (though Christians would claim that they are products of a natural desire for God, implanted by the creator, though this doesn't mean that desire can't be commingling with other, fallen mental processes). So that hypothesis (even though I don't accept it, at least as regards Christian faith) is at least understandable.

What doesn't make any sense at all is Rey's particular enumerated list of 'extensions' of wishful thinking in religious belief and practice. These seem to be specific examples of how self-deception and wishful thinking manifest themselves in things believers do and say. Rey thinks certain things believers do and say betray that they don't really believe what they claim they believe. Let's see if he has a point, and address them:

1) Detail Resistance
2) Comparability to Fiction

Though listed separately, this is actually a single objection, with #2 functioning as an addendum to #1. The problem here is that he mistakes a well established doctrine of creation ex nihilo for intellectual incuriosity to detail, when really it's acute attention to the conceptual details of that doctrine which reveals there simply can be no mechanistic 'details' of the kind he's asking for, nor is there any reason to expect they should exist. On the contrary, expecting them (as he does) shows a lack of understanding of the doctrine. The lay religious person may not articulate this to him in his interactions with them, but it's what they're intuiting when they recognize his questions as 'silly'. The one example he gives of 'detail resistance' is justified 'detail resistance'. Ignoring the specific example, and attempting to make sense of the objection itself, it still fails; given the Christian doctrine of Incarnation -- that God became flesh in a very particular, fleshly Jew, in whom all truth and hope resides -- 'detail', or the finite, or the-particular-as-such is entirely redeemed, as David Bentley Hart explains in The Beauty of The Infinite. The details of the form of Christ are everything, and we have no desire to shy from them.

However, it is sometimes, with regards to certain questions, entirely appropriate to point out that the "how" of some process is at best of secondary importance, or possibly of no functional significance at all.

3) Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence

Here he attempts to flip a common theistic refrain on its head, though he fails to do so. Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, if the evidence that's missing is evidence we would otherwise expect to find were the claim true. Which is the case (to some extent) in the murder example he gives, but not the case as regards Christian belief, and so the supposed objection is really no objection at all. If Christian belief is true there is no reason to expect we should have more evidence that it's true than what we do in fact have.

4) Appeals to "Mystery"

Some believers appeal to 'mystery' or 'paradox' at times when they ought not to. When, for instance, an answer to something isn't actually a mystery, it's just something they don't know or understand. Believers ought to have more humility and acknowledge that just because they don't understand, or aren't aware of, something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a mystery. However, certain appeals to mystery (as it happens, the ones that are most commonly made) are absolutely justified, given that an infinite God can't be fully apprehended by finite creatures. We can -- through His Grace, the Incarnation, scripture, tradition and the intervention of the Holy Spirit -- come to know truths that He reveals to us about Him, but as finite beings we by definition will not be able to have a full knowledge of Him. This "appeal to mystery" is entirely appropriate given the infinite-finite distinction.

5) Merely Symbolic Status of the Stories

This objection is not very well articulated. First he objects to the internal coherence of the Christian doctrine of atonement (an objection which is predicated on a misunderstanding, which I will explain anon), and then says something about how if the Christian story is merely symbolism then the problems aren't relevant. Well yes, but so what? Is he saying that many believers do claim that such stories are symbolic? If so, how are they self-deceiving, according to him? I honestly can't make out what his point is here.

As for his objection to the doctrine of the atonement: One must first understand death as a consequence of sin -- rather than just something that happens for no ultimate reason, but just because of entropy or whatever -- and then one can begin to understand how the unjustified death of a sinless man can be an atoning death. I won't attempt to exegete the entire doctrine here, but he is missing the very fundamental first principles of it and then declaring it incoherent. Of course, if God doesn't exist, and death isn't a consequence of sin etc. then the atonement of Jesus doesn't make sense either, but what he's really objecting to here is the internal logic of the scheme of atonement, when that logic is absolutely pristine and he simply doesn't understand it.

6) Betrayals By Reactions and Behavior

The example he gives here may be somehow inconsistent for certain faiths, but not for Christian faith. And I suspect his confusion is a result of a confusion that is common among Christians too, which he just accepts but which is false; namely, that our eternal destiny is a disembodied heaven which we arrive at upon at the instance of our death, when actually our hope is in bodily resurrection and in New creation, a New Heavens and a New Earth. None of which has yet to come, and so mourning at death (which is a consequence of sin, and antithetical to God's plans for creation) is completely consistent and appropriate. Again, his confusion is somewhat understandable since even a wide swath of Christians share it, but it's his (and their) confusion that leads to seeing mourning as contradictory when it's perfectly consonant with orthodox Christian belief. "Blessed are the mourners, for they shall be [future tense] comforted". Jesus, significantly, didn't say "cursed are the mourners for there is nothing to mourn." Because there is something to mourn; death is inimical to God, God's enemy, and Christ defeats his enemy at the cross. Because of Christ's work death has no ultimate power over us, and therefore we don't sorrow like those without hope, but we do mourn a loss to the waste and destruction of death. For now.

7) Belief is Not a Matter of Choice

Again, his point here isn't all that clear. It seems to consist in nothing more than ponderous musings on the nature of 'faith' and how faith differs from simple 'belief'. Well, yes, quite. And? He does make the unsupported assertion that "I suspect you can have 'faith' only about what isn't really a serious contender for truth." Oh you suspect that, eh? Cool story, bro. I suspect differently. Glad that's all cleared up.

Somewhat more seriously, faith is mostly invoked with regard to propositions that are not matters of efficient, material causality, and so when he talks about "a serious contender for truth", he's pitting religious belief against scientific empiricism as a means for finding out truths about material causality -- something people of faith don't use faith for, at least not in the vast majority of cases, so the objection is just absurd and amounts to no more than "faith doesn't do what it isn't intended to do".

8) Projection

Here he merely asserts that humans have the capability to project meaning into things where it might not be there. Of course, he doesn't make an argument showing why this is what is occurring in all or most instances of religious belief, but merely asserts that it's something that can happen. Indeed it can, though I'm not sure how this supports his hypothesis. If the meaning he believes is being projected into things is actually there and he just isn't apprehending it, then it's his senses which are damaged, not the supposed 'projector'. And assuming said meaning isn't there presupposes atheism, rather than lends support to it as a conclusion.

In addition to each of these claims having problems within themselves, many of them don't even have any logical link to his central hypothesis about self-deception. His #3, for example, is just an attempt at a standard atheistic argument about God's non-existence. It's a de facto objection, not the de jure objection he was claiming that he was making. It's about the likely truth of religious belief, not whether religious persons are self-deceiving for holding to the belief. The objection, even if true, would not establish that religious people were self-deceiving when noting that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is true to varying degrees of a number of the listed objections.

Granted, this isn't a scholarly piece, and it comes with a disclaimer that he has developed the argument in more depth elsewhere, but with such carelessness of thought and with so many fundamental errors and misunderstandings, I can't imagine the argument gets anything but more convoluted and confused in its 'deeper' incarnation.

15 comments:

  1. When you dismiss these 3,700+ gods, that's when I will dismiss the Christian god.

    http://www.godchecker.com/

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    1. ... so if I don't dismiss those gods you won't dismiss the Christian God? Methinks you bungled this point.

      And, actually, I'm not even quite sure what your *intended* point was, or how it relates to the argument.

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  2. The United States of America declared its independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on July 4, 1776. And that's when the Christian god decided to choose a team.

    You'll never get my "intended" point, because it is pointless debating a Christian. The Earth is billions of years old, and the Christian god decided to send himself, itself, whateverself on a suicide mission 2,000 years ago? Really?

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  3. I think you have completely missed the entire point, in that meta-atheism isn't a set or even a single objection to Christianity or other people of faith. It is merely an explanatory idea that many people believe in "belief" (As Dan Dennett says). That is that they continue to claim they are apart of x religion when really there isn't any authentic conviction behind it. Now since Rey claims "many people" instead of "all people," his thesis is really not off base, since you obviously stay strong in your convictions you'd be the other that is excluded in Rey's "many." Considering such papers as "Preachers Who Are Not Believers" (another Dennett work), there is some evidence to support Rey's idea.

    Nice try though.

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    1. Hey Matthew,

      I appreciate the first on-topic response to my post yet! Between Google+ and here I've had about 6 comments in response and yours is the first intelligible one that's on topic. Well done.

      If you'll notice, though, my central issue isn't even with Rey's thesis (I mean, I reject it, but I don't lay out that argument in full here). Indeed, as I said, if God doesn't exist then Rey's definitely correct and even if the God of one religion exists, he's *still* largely correct for the belief in all the other gods.

      My problem was the specifics of the examples in the list he gives and how they either just don't make sense, or if they do, don't support his thesis.

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    2. Your point seems to defend the gist of his argument, as perhaps formulated more coherently elsewhere by others, rather than the specifics of what he's written and how he defended it.

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    3. 7) Belief is Not a Matter of Choice

      Correct. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd have "faith" in Islam. If you were born in China, you'd have "faith" in Buddha. If you were born in Sweden, you'd probably be faithless. Sweden tops atheists. Best quote to end my point.

      "It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so." ~ Ernestine Rose

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    4. Rey is only positing a necessary (v. sufficient) argument which could explain even the most devout believer as being deluded. With such explanations, one must weigh the probability of a believer being deluded vs. being correct, in which case the unending font of human folly suggests that the commonality of delusion removes all "witnessing" claims regarding God. Which is all of them.

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    5. Nathan - Dr. Boghossian also (quite fairly, IMO) linked to your essay from FB, which is why you might be seeing more comment traffic than previously.

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  4. A well-written article, good job. It took considerable work do justice to in challenge. Nevertheless, here are my replies:

    .

    > Be that as it may, it certainly isn't controversial to suggest that if God is not real, or there is no supernatural reality, that therefore religious belief is a product of wishful thinking or self-deception.

    Actually, we have no waying whether God is real or not. Therefore, the non/existence of God has no bearing on how we come up with the idea. If it's wishful thinking or self-deception in a Godless universe, then it's still wishful thinking or self-deception in a universe that had God - in that case, it would have just happened to have been correct, against all odds.

    The only way that it's not is if one posits miraculous intervention into our thought processes, in which case an entire host of other problems springs up. What about free will? Exactly *how* does God "do" anything at all (a question also raised in Rey's article under "Detail Resistance")? If God were real, then His miracles would be subject to science-like inquiry in terms of how they get from His will to actual events in reality. It is just such a form of inquiry that led midevial thinkers to arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

    .

    > - there simply can be no mechanistic 'details' of the kind he's asking for, nor is there any reason to expect they should exist. On the contrary, expecting them (as he does) shows a lack of understanding of the doctrine.

    This is exactly why we atheists accuse believers of putting their fingers in their ears and closing their eyes to the process of inquiry about how the world works.

    Claiming that people who ask exactly is the causal process by which an event gets from God's mind to the real world are missing the point, amounts to the intellectual position of "sit down and shut up, we don't ask that question here."

    .

    > - given the Christian doctrine of Incarnation -- that God became flesh in a very particular, fleshly Jew, in whom all truth and hope resides -- 'detail', or the finite, or the-particular-as-such is entirely redeemed.

    I'm sorry, but "redeemed" is simply not the same thing as "answered." Either you have answered the question, or you haven't. You haven't. Claiming to have "redeemed" it is philosophically meaningless.

    .

    > If Christian belief is true there is no reason to expect we should have more evidence that it's true than what we do in fact have.

    I feel the same way about leprechauns. Therefore, according you your system, leprechauns exist.

    .

    > However, certain appeals to mystery (as it happens, the ones that are most commonly made) are absolutely justified, given that an infinite God can't be fully apprehended by finite creatures. We can -- through His Grace, the Incarnation, scripture, tradition and the intervention of the Holy Spirit -- come to know truths that He reveals to us about Him, but as finite beings we by definition will not be able to have a full knowledge of Him.

    We also cannot measure just how much of a percentage we know about Him. It might be (and if He existed, would probably be) astronomically infinitesimal. As such, no one should ever be able to claim to know His will, even with a bible in hand. If we admit ignosticism (as you just did) then the theist position is at most pure deism, which excludes the specificity of Christianity.

    .

    > Is he saying that many believers do claim that such stories are symbolic? If so, how are they self-deceiving, according to him? I honestly can't make out what his point is here.

    I take his point as meaning that such a story would only have any force symbolically. In literal terms, no sane system of justice would lead to killing one person to absolve the crimes of others, much less the notion that the more good or holy that person is, the more sins their execution absolves.

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  5. > - and then one can begin to understand how the unjustified death of a sinless man can be an atoning death.

    Nope, still don't get it. Can't kill person A to atone for the sins of person B. If that were the case, then all murderers would get a free pass to heaven.

    In this case, Jesus as the "lamb of God" merely constitutes raising the prior Hebrew tradition of animal sacrifice to one of human sacrifice. The Aztecs also believed that killing some humans would prevent their gods from bringing disaster down on all humans.

    .

    > - but what he's really objecting to here is the internal logic of the scheme of atonement, when that logic is absolutely pristine and he simply doesn't understand it.

    And yet, you still haven't been able to explain it.

    .

    > I suspect his confusion is a result of a confusion that is common among Christians too, which he just accepts but which is false; namely, that our eternal destiny is a disembodied heaven which we arrive at upon at the instance of our death, when actually our hope is in bodily resurrection and in New creation, a New Heavens and a New Earth.

    Whether one immediately goes to an eternal extradimensional "happy place" or is spiritually placed "on ice" for later bodily resurrection in a reconstructed Earthly paradise makes no difference whatsoever. In either case, the remainder of the mourners' life must be borne without the loved one present, and at the moment that both are next conscious, they'll be together. There is no significant difference to the feelings of those left to mourn. Therefore, the pain of mourning still betrays a measure of cognitive dissonance in the mourner.

    Frankly, this response strikes me as a slap in the face to those who lost their loved ones and are aggrieved for it. If only they believed in the specific form of after-life that you do, then they'd kind-of mourn, but it's not really the feeling of crushing loss that they are actually experiencing.

    .

    > Jesus, significantly, didn't say "cursed are the mourners for there is nothing to mourn."

    I could make up a million things that Jesus didn't say (btw, my list would be heavily weighted towards homosexuality and abortion), but that still wouldn't prove anything about Christian doctrine.

    Having no afterlife to hope for means that you have *everything* to mourn. Having any form of afterlife means that you should have nothing to mourn. If you mourn, then it betrays the doubts of all believers. Insulting the feelings of those who do doesn't disprove this point.

    .

    > Belief is Not a Matter of Choice

    Rey is indeed unclear here.

    I would think that if a 50-year old woman living in Des Moines and working as a medical clerk got along with her church group by agreeing that there were an even number of stars or that cats lived on distant planets, she'd be glad to do so. It would ease her social interactions, and the truth of the matter would have little to no impact on her daily life.

    As Rey puts it, "I suspect you can have "faith" only about what isn't really a serious contender for truth." I suspect the same. If you don't believe in the theory of aerodynamic lift, then you shouldn't get on an airplane. If you don't believe in geologic time, then you can still work as a medical clerk.

    .

    > - faith is mostly invoked with regard to propositions that are not matters of efficient, material causality, and so when he talks about "a serious contender for truth", he's pitting religious belief against scientific empiricism as a means for finding out truths about material causality

    Sadly, many Christians do pit religious belief against scientific empiricism. We could quote debates about evolution, geologic time, and the big bang theory as examples.

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  6. > Of course, he doesn't make an argument showing why this is what is occurring in all or most instances of religious belief, but merely asserts that it's something that can happen. Indeed it can, though I'm not sure how this supports his hypothesis.

    I agree that Rey's essay does not constitute a perfect formal argument debunking religious belief via deductive proof.

    .

    > If the meaning he believes is being projected into things is actually there and he just isn't apprehending it, then it's his senses which are damaged, not the supposed 'projector'.

    Which side are you taking, his or the projector's? If you're claiming that people of faith have extra sensory perception, then please, crawl out on that limb a bit further.

    .

    > And assuming said meaning isn't there presupposes atheism, rather than lends support to it as a conclusion.

    This is correct as written. If it's not there, it's not there. Atheism says "it's not there."

    .

    > It's a de facto objection, not the de jure objection he was claiming that he was making.

    Actually, you introduced the phrase "de jure," not he.

    (sorry about replying in 3 sections, blogger only allows 4,096 char replies, and this deserved somewhat more)

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    1. Elbruce, thanks for the thorough reply. If 4096 char. limits are too restrictive for you, stay away from Twitter!

      In an effort to keep the debate manageable I'm going to attempt to focus on the crucial points of disagreement, but let me know if you think I ignored a critical aspect of your response. I'm going to treat each of your ">"s as a #, from 1-16, to avoid having to do so much quoting, alright?

      2) Well then, this is a quite terrible reason to believe that about believers, as -- IN THIS CASE -- they are closing their eyes to nothing at all, merely noting that it's the nature of the case that there can be no mechanistic detail w/r/t creation ex nihilo. There may be other instances where believers 'shut their eyes' to scientific inquiry, but this has nothing to do with scientific inquiry. 'How', scientifically, does God bring into existence which science can observe? Surely you see the difficulty with the question..

      Also, it isn't strictly true that there is no explicable 'means' by which God creates (the Father creates through the Son, and trinitarian theology makes Creation possible as a concept etc.), just not in the material, mechanical sense that Rey intends.

      3) I didn't claim to have 'answered' anything, merely noted that it isn't true that Christianity is unconcerned with 'details'. I also gave a reference if you're interested in 'how' that works, but that isn't critical.

      4) If my claim that we should not have any more evidence for Christianity than we do, if it is true, were reason for me believing it is true, then you'd have a point. But it wasn't, so you don't.

      5) This is pointless speculation. We could know whatever he chose to reveal, and if it's 'a lot', ok, if it's a little, OK. It makes no difference and nothing about it, in theory, precludes any specific God.

      6, 7, 8)

      I said I wasn't going to attempt to explain the entirety of atonement here (that's a book, not a post), and there was no need for me to do so in order to make my point which was that Rey patently and demonstrably doesn't understand the very basic first principles of atonement, and so can not pronounce upon its internal coherence or lack thereof. And your worldly 'morals' which dictate there can be no atoning for others' sins are fine, as far as they go, within themselves as worldly morals. But if Christianity is true, then what you think is 'moral' actually isn't, and therefore your worldly 'morals' are not terribly relevant as to the question of the internal coherence of the doctrine of atonement. The doctrine is predicated on things such as an *infinitely Holy God of Creation*, which plays no part in your materially determined system of morals. So of course atonement doesn't make sense within that system, but no one ever claimed otherwise.

      (cont)

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    2. 9, 10)

      It does make a difference for believers. This life is precious, a gift from God, and whenever it's taken away it's a devastating thing. If the act mourning, while you were in it, were merely a question of disinterested rationality -- which is the absolutely last thing it actually is -- then it would be more true that mourning is much less necessary for believers. And that IS true, but not completely so. We grieve, but not like those without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Mourning is not synonymous with fear/despair/etc.

      12)

      Indeed, some Christians do do that, but the point here is what Rey is doing illegitimately. None of the central, universal doctrines of the Faith are about claims that 'compete' with empirical reality in any way. If a fundamentalist is claiming the Earth is 6000 y/o, she's doing so on a matter that isn't a central tenet, nay, isn't *any* tenet of the faith. And even in the lives of most fundamentalists, those beliefs aren't the defining aspects of *their* faith either. The vast, vast majority of the time that faith is evoked by believers, it's on matters that are not questions of immanent, material causality.

      14) Neither side; I'm saying that projection can and does happen whether God exists or not, AND that if God does exist, then unbelievers can see 'projection' where there is legitimate, actual deeper meaning being conveyed by the Creator through the mediator of creation, and apprehended by the subject.

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  7. Eloquent, Bruce. I prefer swinging below the belt. Debates are tiresome to some. Especially those who don't have the testicles to admit it.

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