To comment on this debate, I will respond to the summaries posted at https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/d ... e-need-god

For The Motion wrote:
Humans no longer need God to explain the unknown.

This statement already defines the terms of engagement in a way that ignores the actual function of God in the world, engaging only with an obsolete fundamentalist magical unscientific theory which is obviously false.

If we want to engage with a truly meaningful concept of God, it is essential that we engage with a rational critique of supernatural folk traditions that have been superseded by scientific knowledge. That means defining God in ways such as the real hidden anthropic order of the cosmos, and the set of enabling conditions for human flourishing. These definitions do not seek to explain the unknown in the manner of traditional religion, but rather look at how culture connects to nature.

For The Motion wrote:
Rather than turning to faith or religious tradition, modern society should rely on scientific and reasoned inquiry to address today’s challenges and questions.

Science and religion answer different questions. Religion addresses the ethical and cultural values for living, while science finds facts about reality. The secular idea that we can just jettison the great heritage of religious thought is dangerously hooligan.

For The Motion wrote: Morality is independent of God. From the oppression of women and LGBT people to the institution of slavery and genocide, religious groups have used faith to justify society’s worst practices.

The morality presented by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount was well ahead of his time, hence the crucifixion story. The fact that his followers have not caught up with the ethics of JC only illustrates Gandhi’s wry comment that Western Civilization would be a very good idea. “The meek shall inherit the earth” is the opening gambit from Jesus in Matthew’s account of his views, and is not exactly genocidal in intent.

For The Motion wrote: Belief in God stifles modernization: Studies show that intensely religious countries are less innovative and produce less patents than those that aren’t. It is science, rather, that has been at the heart of innovation and discovery.

Yes, that is a good criticism of supernatural faith. But the implicit idea that somehow innovative science can produce workable community ritual and local identity is ridiculous. Religion is good at ritual and ceremony, as Confucius noted.

Imagining that science produces a sufficient moral framework is a recipe for serious psychological problems. Even science has its myths, such as the one displayed here that somehow religion will become obsolete. Religion needs to be reformed to make it rational, not abandoned.

Against The Motion wrote:
Against The Motion
According to NASA, only 4 percent of the universe is known matter; the rest remains largely a mystery. Science alone cannot illuminate or explain this large gap.

Now this is just more dumb Deepakism. We are not going to miraculously find God in dark matter or black holes, but here on earth.

Against The Motion wrote: Scientific progress requires God. The creators of today’s most powerful innovations – from nuclear arms to gene editing technologies – require an awareness of consciousness, and must be guided by a belief in a common good to ensure these technologies don’t destroy society as a whole.

Now they are getting somewhere, with this important concept of “belief in a common good.” This concept opens up metaphysical ideas like truth, love, grace and forgiveness which require a dialogue between science and religion to explain.

The inherent conservatism of religion is a useful restraint on rapid social change, requiring that scientists are accountable to the society.

Against The Motion wrote: The secularization thesis is a myth: A new study by Pew Research Center shows that the world’s Christian and Muslim populations are continuing to grow – even if younger generations don’t attend church.

I think that critique of secularisation is true. The problem here is that secularisation brings with it a series of myths, making flexible individualist urban life normative in ways that are rejected by traditional communities.

People need a sense of the transcendent, of connection to an ultimate truth, which rational science for all its merits cannot provide. Rejecting the transcendent leads to what the Bible quite usefully criticises as idolatry, an implicit worship of material possessions, that is utterly destructive of relational identity.

Proposition: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God

The question seems to be searching for a one-size-fits-all solution, which is impossible since belief (or lack of belief) is a worldview. Those who feel the presence of “God” in their lives are feeling an emotion that is itself very real, but they confuse such subjective emotions with objective reality. Belief itself is always subjective and we get in trouble when one group wants to impose their subjective beliefs on others. This is all true regardless of whether God is real or imaginary, a question that cannot be answered.

I can’t help but think a debate like this would have been a good opportunity to talk about the nature of belief or perhaps the usefulness of belief, as William James said. He said that beliefs are true that “prove useful” to the believer, though this obviously only goes so far. According to James' "pragmatic" philosophy, truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice.

In years past, when we had more uniformity of belief as Christians, belief was more true in terms of James' pragmatism. Belief in God was justifiable even if that God couldn't be supported by facts and evidence.

Doing α helps to bring about β, and
It is morally desirable that β. So,
It is prima facie morally desirable to do α.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prag ... elief-god/

But in the post-Christian world, and since "God" is a constantly moving target, you're going to have problems trying to achieve that coherence that worked in the past. Here's a brief exchange from the Oprah Winfrey show, in which a few panelists try to define "God".

Oprah: What is your definition of God?

Wayne Dyer: God is the highest place within each and every one of us. It’s our divine self.

Michael Singer: The source of you.

Debbie Ford: I define God as an energy. A spiritual energy. It has no denomination, it has no judgment, it has an energy that when we’re connected to it we know why we’re here and what we’re here to do.

DeVon Franklin: My definition of God: God is not only the alpha, the omega, he is friend, he’s a confidant, he is a buddy. He is a lover of my soul. That’s my definition of God.

Marianne Williamson: An all-encompassing love that is the source of all, the reality of all, and the being through which I am.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/ ... 25423.html

Harry brought up the idea that the more we evolve the more we embody God, but he’s speaking from a progressive Christian’s standpoint. A conservative Christian would say the world is moving away from Christianity, which is why so many of them voted for Trump, hoping he would bring back the good ol’ days.

When you get through sorting out all the differences between the two, a conservative Christian is simply a conservative and a progressive Christian is a progressive. In this context, the word “Christian” is almost as useless as the word “God” in terms of its vagueness and what it actually means.

Belief in “God” and/or participation in religion can help us think about morality as a higher purpose and also to be able communicate basic tenets, such as Thou Shalt Not Kill, to each other and we can have a sense of communion through our shared beliefs. It is obvious that many people do think about God in this way.

In that respect religion is probably not very different from literature and drama, which let’s us see different perspectives and dramatize morally ambiguous situations to help us think about our moral bearing as human beings. But in the modern world, facts and evidence play a much larger role in our lives, and subjective belief has necessarily become a mode of personal inspiration only. In a modern diverse state, the old God is an anachronism. With so many different conceptions of “God” there can be no one-size-fits-all solution. One person may derive great spiritual comfort and inspiration from his/her “God” and another may find equal comfort from the arts or from nature or from being with loved ones. And still another will use his/her “God” to rationalize hatred towards gays or Jews or atheists.

I have no doubt that belief in a god or gods served a useful purpose for much of human history, especially in terms of social cohesion, but which of these gods lives today in the modern political state? Far from being something that holds us together, religion has become something that pulls us apart. If there is a one-size-fits-all solution it would have to encompass, besides “do unto others” an attitude of "live and let live" and “to each his own.”

geo wrote: Those who feel the presence of “God” in their lives are feeling an emotion that is itself very real, but they confuse such subjective emotions with objective reality.

Well, the two are intermingled. One process is a sort of oversimplified "theory": there's an earthquake, so the underground god must be angry. Or, I feel inner peace, so some supernatural source must have sent it because I prayed. The other is an actual interaction of emotions with accurate perceptions: I care about following a consistent, harmonious set of principles, I follow practices which represent and cultivate that, so I feel good about it. The interpretation I put on it may be oversimplified, but the emotional confirmation is not specious correlation, or not mainly specious correlation.

geo wrote:Belief itself is always subjective and we get in trouble when one group wants to impose their subjective beliefs on others.

While I thoroughly agree with this, I also consider it an oversimplification. Educated elites tend not to see their judgment and social sanctions as "imposition" (and certainly it is far less problematic than burning at the stake) that doesn't mean the believer fails to notice it.

It also doesn't remove the difficulties of drawing the lines on what is imposition of a belief. Ross Douthat has a nice commentary on "extremists" about abortion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opin ... mists.html
He cites a woman aborting a second-trimester fetus because, as a Down Syndrome child, "it wasn't the child I wanted." If that isn't enough to register, consider the millions of fetuses who have been aborted because they weren't male, or for that matter the millions of daughters already born who were "rolled over on" by parents because they weren't male. Calling the wrongness of those actions a "belief" doesn't excuse us from making the call.

geo wrote:This is all true regardless of whether God is real or imaginary, a question that cannot be answered.

By which you mean cannot be answered objectively.

geo wrote:I can’t help but think a debate like this would have been a good opportunity to talk about the nature of belief or perhaps the usefulness of belief, as William James said. He said that beliefs are true that “prove useful” to the believer, though this obviously only goes so far. According to James' "pragmatic" philosophy, truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice.

I think that is a good formulation of the matter, but as you said it only goes so far. Belief that bullets will not strike soldiers who have rubbed a magical potion on themselves is "useful" to someone, and might even win the war, but it is a confusion of language to say the belief is "true."

One problem with evangelical faith these days is the failure of coherence involved. The emphasis on the supernatural in narrating meaning leads churches to encourage the sort of messages that amount to "I prayed for a parking spot and it opened." As people get more and more invested in the confirmation bias, they leave themselves more and more open to being blind-sided by real tragedies, most of which will not go away with prayer. And as the ones remaining behind are selected for not having had tragedies befall them, the sociology of "I must be living right" becomes seriously problematic.

It is the job of leaders to steer away from the shoals of such incoherence. But 1500 years of accommodating the powerful has removed much of Christianity's ability to do that.

geo wrote:But in the post-Christian world, and since "God" is a constantly moving target, you're going to have problems trying to achieve that coherence that worked in the past.

The coherence that has been achieved by modern theology comes at the expense of simplicity. And so the groups who required a simple story (even though it is far from simple or standardized to implement) resisted that coherence. Unfortunately the decision as to whether to go along with modernism was also mixed up with some poisonous political structures such as racism and misogyny.

Oprah: What is your definition of God?

At the risk of being tedious, there is no conflict between the various definitions given by Oprah's panelists. The various different emphases are not so different from the differences found between the versions promoted by visionaries dealing with supernatural conceptions, such as between Calvinism's stern and judgmental God and St. Francis's humble and caring God.

geo wrote:When you get through sorting out all the differences between the two, a conservative Christian is simply a conservative and a progressive Christian is a progressive. In this context, the word “Christian” is almost as useless as the word “God” in terms of its vagueness and what it actually means.

Wait a minute. Is "progressive" free from this vagueness of which you speak? Is "conservative"? (Tell me, do conservatives believe in free trade? How about fiscal responsibility?) This uselessness is an artifact: the term remains useful to those more interested in what it does convey than in its convenience for being sharply defined.

geo wrote:Belief in “God” and/or participation in religion can help us think about morality as a higher purpose and also to be able communicate basic tenets, such as Thou Shalt Not Kill, to each other and we can have a sense of communion through our shared beliefs. It is obvious that many people do think about God in this way.

Okay, now substitute "Trust in 'God'" for "Belief in 'God'" (first line) and "our shared values" for "our shared beliefs" (next to last line) and you have a working understanding of religion.

geo wrote:In that respect religion is probably not very different from literature and drama, which let’s us see different perspectives and dramatize morally ambiguous situations to help us think about our moral bearing as human beings.

The overlap is striking to many of us. Once you get that mythology is essentially defined by the fact that it makes no difference whether it is fictional (it's representation of meaning is all that really matters - the Prodigal Son or the Unforgiving Servant convey truth about values every bit as well as a factual, newspaper account), then literature and drama become part of humanity's spiritual quest. It may be distressing to think of "Ghoulies" as a part of society's spiritual quest, but then, it is distressing to think of snake handlers and Westboro Baptist as part of Christianity, for us Christians.

geo wrote:But in the modern world, facts and evidence play a much larger role in our lives, and subjective belief has necessarily become a mode of personal inspiration only. In a modern diverse state, the old God is an anachronism.

Evidently to some the anachronistic nature is part of the appeal. To lots of others, it is irrelevant. My urging would be to be patient with these, point out problems if you like but avoid the arrogance of mocking and treating as inferior. We all have our stuff, and there is strong evidence that the urge to mock and feel superior has much more to do with inner problems than with the rightness or wrongness of our judgment.

geo wrote:And still another will use his/her “God” to rationalize hatred towards gays or Jews or atheists.

And if we want to convince those who ostensibly believe in love and mercy and forgiveness to give up their hatreds, it would probably be a good idea not to start by making them some kind of scapegoat.

geo wrote: Far from being something that holds us together, religion has become something that pulls us apart.

Unlike, say, the sixteenth century in Europe, or the Muslim conquest of Spain, or the Hindu/Buddhist tensions in Sri Lanka. As humanity advances (evolves?) it becomes easier to set aside the divisive aspects and focus on the common values promoted. Though I would argue that some basic economic fundamentals make a huge difference in how much people chose to be divisive about religion, politics or anything else.

geo wrote:If there is a one-size-fits-all solution it would have to encompass, besides “do unto others” an attitude of "live and let live" and “to each his own.”

For me, "live and let live" is part of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I realize there are people out there who believe it is more important to impose some sort of soul-saving ideology, but if we truly believe in persuasion, not imposition, then we should be willing to engage in dialogue with those people.

geo wrote:I can't help but think they first need to debate what does "God" actually mean. Because God means something different to everyone. Deepak for example probably thinks God is an universal "consciousness" while fundamentalists think he's a jealous, vindictive deity, so very much like humans.

Yes, I saw about the last half of the debate and think it would have been more instructive if Deepak had been paired with a prominent conservative Christian - perhaps Franklin Graham or Pat Robertson – who denounced Deepak’s beliefs from the podium as Satanic. That would have exposed deep fault lines on that side of the aisle.

Harry Marks wrote: But fundamentalists and anti-theists have succeeded in defining an Abrahamic God as primarily jealous and punitive, with little understanding of the full range of relationship expressed even in the OT writings. I wonder how many who are fond of quoting the talking points against the Abrahamic God have any concept of the love and mercy expressed there.

I see statements like that from several posters on BookTalk, but I don’t think they’re valid. Sorry if I’m a broken record, but when considering the near extinction event known as Noah’s Ark plus future genocides promised in the book of Revelations and elsewhere, I cannot fathom how one calls this Triune Deity (Yahweh / Jesus / Holy Ghost) loving or merciful.

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
Matthew 25: 40 – 43

LanDroid wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: But fundamentalists and anti-theists have succeeded in defining an Abrahamic God as primarily jealous and punitive, with little understanding of the full range of relationship expressed even in the OT writings. I wonder how many who are fond of quoting the talking points against the Abrahamic God have any concept of the love and mercy expressed there.

I see statements like that from several posters on BookTalk, but I don’t think they’re valid. Sorry if I’m a broken record, but when considering the near extinction event known as Noah’s Ark plus future genocides promised in the book of Revelations and elsewhere, I cannot fathom how one calls this Triune Deity (Yahweh / Jesus / Holy Ghost) loving or merciful.

Well, that's because you buy into an interpretation that says all the Biblical representations must be considered literally true. The authoritarian version of Christianity (which was most of official Christianity before around 1800) promoted an approach to the religion which downplayed the metaphorical and poetical approach to much of what is said about God, even though it is unmissably obvious once you see it.

To the ancients, it was incontrovertible that terrible things happen: floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and common to attribute them to angry supernatural beings. So the message we should be attending to is what those beings got angry about. Yahweh notably gets angry about human violence and injustice. I can't think of a single story in Greek and Roman mythology, or Norse mythology, in which injustice features as something for the gods to care about.

Sure, taken at face value the story of Noah's ark is a story about punishing violence. But the editors were careful to make it punishment for violent wickedness. The Jews were cultivating a new thing on earth: a society in which the voice representing the powerless, the marginalized, and the decent was a voice expressing the priorities of the ultimate power. Normally we honor that kind of innovation.

Recent scholarship has observed that the devastation promised in Revelation echoes almost exactly some of the prophecies in the Old Testament, calling for horrible decimation of the enemies of Israel. People knew, at the time they were written down, that they were vastly exaggerated expressions of anger and vengefulness, so it is reasonable to suppose that the audience for Revelation knew the same thing. I'm not saying genocide is all in good fun, but I am saying that in an era when the Romans crucified people by the tens of thousands, that kind of trash talk was pretty much normal.

Now, if you think every word ever put into the literary mouth of a character (let's say Queen Elizabeth I of England, or Mark Antony of Rome) defines that person's actual character, then sure - Yahweh is a bully and a thug. That's the implication of the fundamentalist line. But if you compare the words and behavior of Yahweh in the OT to the words and behavior of other similar characters (i.e. deities) at the time, he comes off pretty well. Not only caring about the poor and the powerless, but expressing himself with tenderhearted sentiments you would never hear from All-Wise Odin or Apollo the just.

And when you get to the New Testament? No, sorry, no indictment holds up. The God of the New Testament is all about caring and persuasion.

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
Matthew 25: 40 – 43

But note that, unlike the Medieval church, the Jews of the time did not believe in eternal torment. Being burned up in the fire that torments demons was a simple end to things. There is a story about the rich man and Lazarus which portrays continuing torment, but that appears to be a device so he can plea for a warning to his brothers about the consequences of heartlessness.

What believers of the time would have heard from both those stories (depart from me, and the rich man and Lazarus) is who was being punished: the uncaring, the callous, the heartless, the powerful. Now, that may be reason enough for people with academic tenure to be upset with Yahweh, but to argue that punishing heartlessness is heartless is a bit of a stretch.

Harry Marks wrote:

geo wrote: Those who feel the presence of “God” in their lives are feeling an emotion that is itself very real, but they confuse such subjective emotions with objective reality.

Well, the two are intermingled. One process is a sort of oversimplified "theory": there's an earthquake, so the underground god must be angry. Or, I feel inner peace, so some supernatural source must have sent it because I prayed. The other is an actual interaction of emotions with accurate perceptions: I care about following a consistent, harmonious set of principles, I follow practices which represent and cultivate that, so I feel good about it. The interpretation I put on it may be oversimplified, but the emotional confirmation is not specious correlation, or not mainly specious correlation.

We had a good discussion a while back on the function of myth, and I tried to draw a distinction between metaphoric truth and literal truth. Science, for the most part, gives us literal truth—say, how far the moon is from earth, the albedo of a star, etc.—based on measurements and observations. . . . Language is imprecise and cannot always be relied on to communicate nuances of thought and feeling, thus we use stories, allegories, and metaphors to clarify and illustrate such complexities that sometimes are difficult to explain in concrete terms. We even use metaphors to illustrate complex scientific ideas.

posting.php?mode=edit&f=8&p=113285

Humans experience the world with emotions and we don’t always know why something feels good. I agree that religious belief does resonate with many people and helps them achieve that emotional confirmation you mention and helps them to frame their existence in a kind of higher purpose. I think this is what William James talks about in his “Will To Believe” lectures.

If you see the story of Noah's ark as a fable or allegory, showing how man's hubris can lead to his own downfall, it serves as metaphoric truth. Indeed, it's a very relevant story in that sense. Such myths and stories are great glimpses into the past, depicting man's relationship with his gods and all the pathos and drama of human existence.

But as LanDroid said, unfortunately, quite a lot of people believe that the Bible is the "inerrant" word of God. They have turned what could be metaphoric truth into dogma. They believe that the Great Flood really happened and that God was willing to wipe out every living form of life on earth and that Noah kept two of every kind of animal on board, etc. They try to justify, for example, why God asked Abraham to kill his son, as if it really happened.

LanDroid wrote:. . . it would have been more instructive if Deepak had been paired with a prominent conservative Christian - perhaps Franklin Graham or Pat Robertson – who denounced Deepak’s beliefs from the podium as Satanic. That would have exposed deep fault lines on that side of the aisle.

And because the word “Christian” encompasses everything from the New Age spirituality to Pat Robertson type dogma, the word doesn't mean anything. On the Pat Robertson side, religion is authoritarian and right-wing political. I recall Stahrwe once making the argument that Catholicism isn't really Christian. And there we have it.

Just looking at this discussion again. We moved houses, and I didn't have internet for a week or so, which was fine, but I have to say it's pretty great to be able to communicate in-depth with very thoughtful people--although I'll never meet any of you (in the old sense).

The debate was not well-conceived. I could sense that even the participants seemed antsy and had trouble focusing their thoughts on the topic. Harry again hits it on the head when he says that by defining God as external consciousness, the against side created a "so what?" that killed them right there. And he's right that "need" was never defined. The for side's position that we can get along without God wasn't probed by the opponents. Might we be missing something essential if our answer is to kick spirituality out of the picture? That was an opportunity lost.

I'm even a little cranky about the assumption of our moral evolution. I wouldn't have minded a good conservative take on how far we've come as a species. Who is meant by this morally advanced "we?" Are we so sure that we might not have become less advanced on some dimension? What time sample are we using to prove that we've permanently evolved, 100 years? 200? In the scope of history, that's not so long and there have been plenty of reversals in civilizations who thought they had become too good to fail.

Harry Marks wrote: Why would we need an enforcer God? Because powerful people do stuff to others (like threaten them if they talk about an affair to the press) because they can. Because impunity. If the community agrees that such people "deserve punishment" (like Harvey Weinstein being shunned) whether in the afterlife or not, then such a God is being embodied. And is that something we need? You tell me.

Yes, we do need an enforcer. Since the time of Hammurabi, the law has slowly taken the place of the enforcer god, at least temporally. I think it's the idea of the enforcer God that is particularly dissonant for today's secularists and the liberal religious wing. It's why Pat Robertson sounds so incredibly out of it when he says God made the ground quake in a state with liberal abortion laws.

Harry Marks wrote:More interesting to me is the question why we need a forgiving, loving God. It gets a lot of attention among Progressive Christians (and Jews), but I don't sense much awareness among the skeptical community. Maybe they have another word to suggest for what is being embodied if the community agrees that forgiveness, love and reconciliation are more effective than punishment and shunning?

The skeptical community doesn't seem to employ a language with which to talk about the non-quantifiables you list. My feeling is that we skeptics often assume that not much needs to be said about love, forgiveness, reconciliation, perhaps because if religion would just get out of the way, our moral auto-pilot would take us where we need to get to. Your perspective on the subject would have come in handy in the debate.

Harry Marks wrote:But fundamentalists and anti-theists have succeeded in defining an Abrahamic God as primarily jealous and punitive, with little understanding of the full range of relationship expressed even in the OT writings. I wonder how many who are fond of quoting the talking points against the Abrahamic God have any concept of the love and mercy expressed there. Check out the book of Jonah, sometime, or the book of Ruth. Check out the story of Joseph, who forgave the brothers who had sold him into slavery (as a "humane" alternative to killing him) and earned the title "tzaddik" (just or righteous one) in the Talmudic commentaries.

That's an interesting alliance between fundamentalists and anti-theists. I was saying that, just for clarity of purpose, the "God" in the proposition should have been a director God, since this is how God is still generally understood. But certainly you're correct that many of us, being somewhat put off by the Bible, have a superficial knowledge and appreciation of it. We used to have a young-earth guy posting here who tried to get us to join him in a complete reading of the Bible. He had no takers, because it would have been just too contentious. Your approach to the book looks more promising.

Robert Tulip wrote: This is the key evolutionary adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount, that divinity operates on the morality of forgiveness not revenge. The evolutionary point is that humans come to embody God as we live by mind rather than instinct. And yet in this fallen world instinct remains an immensely powerful driver of popular myth. The story of Jesus Christ is about overcoming the intuitive instincts in the Mosaic Law that equate justice with revenge, aiming instead for a consequentialist ethic where the results of our action are the key criterion of moral validity. Instead of the feeling of satisfaction and recompense from the ethic of ‘eye for an eye’, the focus of the Gospel ethic of forgiveness for repentance is what sort of shared world we are creating as the result of our responses.

I like that. Harry has said, though, that the OT isn't quite so concentrated on revenge, though the vengefulness of God gets the most play with readers unsympathetic to the Bible. If you add the focus on justice that is probably given more attention in the OT than the NT, the OT doesn't look so much like an atavistic relic needing to be superceded. Certainly the Jews would agree.

Harry Marks wrote:But that is not to be. Those on the outside of religion usually have in mind a version they are rejecting, and any other version, I can tell you from long experience, is treated as not legitimate, as some kind of one-off invention for debating purposes. So fine. They would not go about it the way I consider ideal. What else might they do?

I've noticed a couple of times skeptics telling Christians that they're obligated to endorse everything in the Bible, because it is, after all, their own book. They're insisting the Christians be fundamentalist, although of course they don't like fundamentalists. I've always liked Robert Wrights's dictum that religions aren't what their leaders or scriptures say they are. We have to look "on the ground" to see the ways the religion is being lived, which from a point of view of strictness would often be judged inconsistent with what's on paper.

Harry Marks wrote:It may be true that we build up skills that can be used without reference to the transcendent or the absolute, but Christian philosophers believe that the transcendent and the absolute are incorporated directly into the structure of these advanced skills.

The transcendent or absolute could be part of the language needed to employ the skills. I'm not sure about this, but if I try to call to mind more technical terms used in sociology, psychology, and counseling, I get more of an impression of jargon and faddish usages. Of course, there is Christian counseling, which I know nothing about. One image people have of it is that the counselor would remind the counselee of what God has made clear. But I suspect there is more to it than that, and it could be that faith-type language and shared assumptions make the work more effective.

Harry Marks wrote:To give a simple example, it was inevitable that countries with democracy as a core value, such as England and the U.S., would reject slavery. Why? Because the basis for choosing democracy is justice, and thus the system incorporates a rejection of injustice into all of the rationales for how it chooses to do things. It creates the equivalent of "cognitive dissonance" within an individual, when the system tries to behave according to principles of justice while at the same time building a rational infrastructure for dealing with slavery.

Interesting...I at first was surprised at the statement, given that in the U.S. slavery was going strong long past the time of its abolition in Europe, some of whose countries were democracies, but not all. If not for one man very determined to preserve the union, slavery might have existed in the South in 1900 (and long beyond?) Looking at the modern persistence of slavery in China and India (a democracy but caste-bound), your theory may have merit.

Robert Tulip wrote:If we want to engage with a truly meaningful concept of God, it is essential that we engage with a rational critique of supernatural folk traditions that have been superseded by scientific knowledge. That means defining God in ways such as the real hidden anthropic order of the cosmos, and the set of enabling conditions for human flourishing. These definitions do not seek to explain the unknown in the manner of traditional religion, but rather look at how culture connects to nature.

That proposal does seem to be suitable for religious belief, since although it violates no scientific facts, it cannot be proven but must be maintained by faith. Your idea might be the best litmus test for pure atheism. A committed atheist would, I think, be at least agnostic about the universe having any a priori meaning.

Robert Tulip wrote: The morality presented by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount was well ahead of his time, hence the crucifixion story. The fact that his followers have not caught up with the ethics of JC only illustrates Gandhi’s wry comment that Western Civilization would be a very good idea. “The meek shall inherit the earth” is the opening gambit from Jesus in Matthew’s account of his views, and is not exactly genocidal in intent.

Yet wouldn't you have to agree that morality is independent of God? I don't think it works in this instance to say that God is not God but is rather an insight, so morality is dependent on this insight we have renamed God.

Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, that is a good criticism of supernatural faith. But the implicit idea that somehow innovative science can produce workable community ritual and local identity is ridiculous. Religion is good at ritual and ceremony, as Confucius noted.

Imagining that science produces a sufficient moral framework is a recipe for serious psychological problems. Even science has its myths, such as the one displayed here that somehow religion will become obsolete. Religion needs to be reformed to make it rational, not abandoned.

I share your skepticism that getting religion out of the way will make everything all better by itself. The other part on the need for religion to be rational we've discussed before and had differing views. Maybe the problem is: what does rational mean? The word confers approval, so it's subject to value judgment. To make the word more neutral I'd define it as truth based on the evidence of our senses, including all the ways we have of extending the reach of our senses. Using that yardstick, a life that continues after our bodies die and an anthropic order of the cosmos aren't rational, but neither should we call them irrational. I'd go so far as to say a belief is not in the category of the rational at all; it always involves something that we may feel we know but cannot prove, such as that democracy is the best government to live under. There is also a large element of aspiration and inspiration here that is an essential part of religion. Without that element, conferred in large part by the very unrationality of key statements, religion doesn't exist.

geo wrote:The question seems to be searching for a one-size-fits-all solution, which is impossible since belief (or lack of belief) is a worldview. Those who feel the presence of “God” in their lives are feeling an emotion that is itself very real, but they confuse such subjective emotions with objective reality. Belief itself is always subjective and we get in trouble when one group wants to impose their subjective beliefs on others. This is all true regardless of whether God is real or imaginary, a question that cannot be answered.

Accepting pluralism of skin tones and culture is one thing. Accepting pluralism of metaphysics is another, more challenging one. If particular notions of God or what God does are allowed to be called subjective, then the fierce tribal pride of possessing the true knowledge is threatened. I think the direction that Harry, and I think Robert, indicate--that systems not be based in subjective, unprovable metaphysics, but in emotional and psychic needs that are truly universal--is the better way to go whether or not it actually holds up as religion.

geo wrote:I can’t help but think a debate like this would have been a good opportunity to talk about the nature of belief or perhaps the usefulness of belief, as William James said. He said that beliefs are true that “prove useful” to the believer, though this obviously only goes so far. According to James' "pragmatic" philosophy, truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice.

In years past, when we had more uniformity of belief as Christians, belief was more true in terms of James' pragmatism. Belief in God was justifiable even if that God couldn't be supported by facts and evidence.

That seems to me a more useful standard than using a notion of rationality, rationality tending to be itself a subjective notion!

geo wrote:In that respect religion is probably not very different from literature and drama, which let’s us see different perspectives and dramatize morally ambiguous situations to help us think about our moral bearing as human beings. But in the modern world, facts and evidence play a much larger role in our lives, and subjective belief has necessarily become a mode of personal inspiration only. In a modern diverse state, the old God is an anachronism. With so many different conceptions of “God” there can be no one-size-fits-all solution. One person may derive great spiritual comfort and inspiration from his/her “God” and another may find equal comfort from the arts or from nature or from being with loved ones. And still another will use his/her “God” to rationalize hatred towards gays or Jews or atheists.

I guess the comfort side is important; however, if we analogize literature with religion we won't emphasize comfort very much, but rather something different--maybe inspiration, maybe insight through empathy, but maybe even discomfort and unsettling of certain complacencies. With religion, too, the challenges and difficulties can be emphasized, and perhaps they even should be in order to avoid the harmful certitudes we often mention.

DWill wrote: by defining God as external consciousness, the against side created a "so what?" that killed them right there.

To no good purpose, either. Their only mode of confronting the proposition seemed to be to claim that consciousness is required for thinking, learning, etc. None of which strikes the average Westerner as being at all relevant to a discussion of God.

I have never read any of Chopra's stuff, but to me his pronouncements seem to suffer more from translation difficulties (he seems never to have gone to the trouble to understand how Western, objectivity-based discussion works, I suspect because his clientele want the feeling of escaping from it) than from vacuous "deepities".

DWill wrote:The for side's position that we can get along without God wasn't probed by the opponents. Might we be missing something essential if our answer is to kick spirituality out of the picture? That was an opportunity lost.

And how. Much of American discussion of workplace styles, child-rearing, etc. revolves around a supposed dichotomy between emotion and reason, and seems completely uninformed about the spiritual, which is the meeting ground and marriage of the two.

DWill wrote:I'm even a little cranky about the assumption of our moral evolution. I wouldn't have minded a good conservative take on how far we've come as a species. Who is meant by this morally advanced "we?" Are we so sure that we might not have become less advanced on some dimension?

Interesting. I come down on the side of moral evolution, but you are right to question that. We have gained in our ability to view things dispassionately, and certainly have improved technically. I don't just mean the technical side of material life, though that does matter. We now routinely raise children without corporal punishment, for example.

But the kinds of problems Robert points out also matter. Our lives are more disconnected and anonymous. Family life centers around options and activities, but builds in less time for intergenerational nurturance (though possibly more time per child, which matters). We have rising rates of anxiety disorders and other mental illness among college students, as the pace of economic competition has increased the stress of trying to achieve. The "thick" interactions that David Brooks lamented may be declining.

DWill wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: If the community agrees that such people "deserve punishment" (like Harvey Weinstein being shunned) whether in the afterlife or not, then such a God (enforcer) is being embodied. And is that something we need? You tell me.

Yes, we do need an enforcer. Since the time of Hammurabi, the law has slowly taken the place of the enforcer god, at least temporally.

I tend to agree that some enforcement of the rules is important - by secular authorities. I don't just think the enforcer God is bad theology, I think enforcement as Ultimate Concern is socially corrosive. (Our Ultimate Concern, which organizes our other values, is our god.) Rather, punishment needs to be within a context of relationship and caring, even for the evildoer. The mass incarceration crisis of the 80s and 90s demonstrates the problem with "law enforcement" in an impersonal and even hostile framework.

DWill wrote:I think it's the idea of the enforcer God that is particularly dissonant for today's secularists and the liberal religious wing. It's why Pat Robertson sounds so incredibly out of it when he says God made the ground quake in a state with liberal abortion laws.

Yes, the God of the Gaps makes a terribly arbitrary and unreliable enforcer.

DWill wrote:My feeling is that we skeptics often assume that not much needs to be said about love, forgiveness, reconciliation, perhaps because if religion would just get out of the way, our moral auto-pilot would take us where we need to get to.

Ta-Nehisi Coates was a good antidote to such blithe optimism. A small gang decided, for reasons we are not told, to knock him down and stomp on his head. His father said, regarding a bully, "You fight him or you fight me." A considerable portion of society has been denied the social peace which allows "auto-pilot" to do a reasonably good job. And perhaps because we see it as someone else's problem, a considerable portion of society blames the victims and refuses to see the injustice creating such a divide. So I would question whether our moral auto-pilot is actually doing such a great job.

DWill wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:But fundamentalists and anti-theists have succeeded in defining an Abrahamic God as primarily jealous and punitive, with little understanding of the full range of relationship expressed even in the OT writings.

I was saying that, just for clarity of purpose, the "God" in the proposition should have been a director God, since this is how God is still generally understood. But certainly you're correct that many of us, being somewhat put off by the Bible, have a superficial knowledge and appreciation of it.

I was once enamored of a girl raised as an atheist Jew. I was astonished how much she, though highly intelligent and precocious, was ignorant of religion. Of course I am the opposite extreme, having been saturated in religious talk from a young age and devoted considerable time in my adult years to furthering my acquaintance.

I would even go so far as to question whether "director God" is still how God is generally understood by the religious. Certainly there is a lot of traditional Biblical exegesis that fits in that category, yet the categories used by Oprah's panelists are much closer to what is understood by the clergy and preached from the pulpit, in a wide swath of Christianity and Judaism. The "Jesus as friend" theology is coming to dominate the "Jesus as good luck charm" theology among evangelicals. And people in the pews really do try to create an account of things in their head, even if most don't have the confidence to explain it to others. So they are hearing Jesus as friend and it resonates.

DWill wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote: This is the key evolutionary adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount, that divinity operates on the morality of forgiveness not revenge. The evolutionary point is that humans come to embody God as we live by mind rather than instinct.
The story of Jesus Christ is about overcoming the intuitive instincts in the Mosaic Law that equate justice with revenge, aiming instead for a consequentialist ethic where the results of our action are the key criterion of moral validity.

I like that. Harry has said, though, that the OT isn't quite so concentrated on revenge, though the vengefulness of God gets the most play with readers unsympathetic to the Bible. If you add the focus on justice that is probably given more attention in the OT than the NT, the OT doesn't look so much like an atavistic relic needing to be superceded. Certainly the Jews would agree.

Absolutely. By the time of Jesus, notions such as stoning adulterers, much less violators of the Sabbath or stiff-necked sons, were pretty much set aside in Jewish culture. I'm not too acquainted with the specifics, but I understand that Philo of Alexandria and Rabbi Gamaliel, to take a couple of prominent examples, taught a very enlightened version of Torah.

If there was much vengefulness left in rhetoric about God I would guess it concentrated on enemies such as the Romans or Antiochan Hellenes. John the Baptist, for example, who seems not to have been one to pull punches, seems to have talked about the problem people being "burned up like chaff" (or similar sentiments) rather than about vengeance.

DWill wrote:I've always liked Robert Wrights's dictum that religions aren't what their leaders or scriptures say they are. We have to look "on the ground" to see the ways the religion is being lived, which from a point of view of strictness would often be judged inconsistent with what's on paper.

Good observations, although the relationship between practice and the "official doctrine" is an endlessly fascinating subject for me. The recent revelations about predatory priests really seem to have changed views about the whole question of the church's authority, with a consequent shift in how seriously to take "strictness." Many catholics seem to have been hanging on almost entirely for the sense of structure and clear boundaries, so it makes me wonder what is left for them.

DWill wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:It may be true that we build up skills that can be used without reference to the transcendent or the absolute, but Christian philosophers believe that the transcendent and the absolute are incorporated directly into the structure of these advanced skills.

The transcendent or absolute could be part of the language needed to employ the skills. I'm not sure about this, but if I try to call to mind more technical terms used in sociology, psychology, and counseling, I get more of an impression of jargon and faddish usages. Of course, there is Christian counseling, which I know nothing about. One image people have of it is that the counselor would remind the counselee of what God has made clear. But I suspect there is more to it than that, and it could be that faith-type language and shared assumptions make the work more effective.

Well, I do have the impression that faith language plays a role. I know a few Christian counselors, though none who define their practice that way. They still seem to work mainly with conceptual structures from psychology, but the orientation would be different in treating judgments about extramarital affairs, for example, as a given - something to ask forgiveness for, not just to be managed in a "well-adjusted" way. Not sure, really. Now I am curious to ask them about what difference it makes.

DWill wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:To give a simple example, it was inevitable that countries with democracy as a core value, such as England and the U.S., would reject slavery. Why? Because the basis for choosing democracy is justice,

Interesting...I at first was surprised at the statement, given that in the U.S. slavery was going strong long past the time of its abolition in Europe, some of whose countries were democracies, but not all. If not for one man very determined to preserve the union, slavery might have existed in the South in 1900 (and long beyond?) Looking at the modern persistence of slavery in China and India (a democracy but caste-bound), your theory may have merit.

You raise a good question, since the South managed to preserve a system of racial oppression right through to the 60s despite democratic language and governmental structures. I take that as a measure of how powerful tribalism is, and how ingrained was the conceptual apparatus to maintain the privilege of the rich despite democracy within the white communities. But I may simply be overestimating the power of cognitive dissonance to goad people into holding each other accountable.

DWill wrote:Yet wouldn't you have to agree that morality is independent of God? I don't think it works in this instance to say that God is not God but is rather an insight, so morality is dependent on this insight we have renamed God.

I don't have any trouble saying that morality embodies the spirit that is God. But that has worked in times and places with little reference to a deity, e.g. China for millennia, and so I am doing more to explain to myself what is valuable in the tradition than to express a need for explicit acknowledgement of God.

Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, that is a good criticism of supernatural faith. But the implicit idea that somehow innovative science can produce workable community ritual and local identity is ridiculous. Religion is good at ritual and ceremony, as Confucius noted.

Ritual and ceremony are ways of representing to ourselves the solemnity of, e.g. marriage. There was a time it would have been natural to invoke hidden supernatural powers to be part of the representation (the spirits of ancestors, in the case of the Chinese) but there is nothing about the supernatural which is required for this to be effective and embody the sacred.

Lincoln claimed that the sacrifice of the soldiers at Gettysburg had "hallowed" the ground, and so it did. Note that he invokes transcendence (some values matter more than any amount of other, lesser values) and the absolute (if you are willing to risk your life for something, you are clearly not dabbling in it or trying it out to see if you like it.) Scientists can believe in such things, but not as a matter of scientifically confirmed fact.

DWill wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:Imagining that science produces a sufficient moral framework is a recipe for serious psychological problems. Even science has its myths, such as the one displayed here that somehow religion will become obsolete. Religion needs to be reformed to make it rational, not abandoned.

I share your skepticism that getting religion out of the way will make everything all better by itself. The other part on the need for religion to be rational we've discussed before and had differing views. Maybe the problem is: what does rational mean?

The effort to make our religious conceptualizations more coherent internally, and more consistent with what reason tells us, has been going on for a long time. India and Israel certainly dove deeply into that, and to some extent the Greeks and Chinese (though their philosophers moved away from the supernatural almost from the beginning). The thing to remember is that rationality is a means, not an end.

DWill wrote:I'd go so far as to say a belief is not in the category of the rational at all; it always involves something that we may feel we know but cannot prove, such as that democracy is the best government to live under. There is also a large element of aspiration and inspiration here that is an essential part of religion. Without that element, conferred in large part by the very unrationality of key statements, religion doesn't exist.

I guess I see this. I am not entirely comfortable with "feel we know but cannot prove" as a criterion, but I certainly agree that is involved. For me it is fundamental to acknowledge that we are processing questions of value, as captured by "aspiration and inspiration," in your statements.

DWill wrote:Accepting pluralism of metaphysics is another, more challenging one.

Yes and no. Our society allows people to live side by side with some believing in reincarnation, some in praying five times a day toward Mecca, and some believing both of those will go to Hell after they die. I suppose that is challenging, but we have more or less gotten the hang of it.

I think even most fundamentalists are aware at some level that their metaphysics is a way of communicating the solemnity of their values. When I was given reasons for disputing other faiths, growing up, it was not on the basis of revelation but of practice: Hindus use reincarnation to justify caste oppression, Muslims (and Mormons!) allow polygamy, etc. But also, Catholics worship statues (i.e. idols), and believe you can just do the sin knowing you can confess it and have it absolved. The metaphysics do enter into the arguments.

DWill wrote:If particular notions of God or what God does are allowed to be called subjective, then the fierce tribal pride of possessing the true knowledge is threatened. I think the direction that Harry, and I think Robert, indicate--that systems not be based in subjective, unprovable metaphysics, but in emotional and psychic needs that are truly universal--is the better way to go whether or not it actually holds up as religion.

In that way, the larger cultural dialogue which is concerned with the same values questions can be engaged and brought into the discussion. The thing to do with those who don't accept the subjectivity of their metaphysics is to approach the question only indirectly, to the extent possible. There are cross-currents within a faith just as there are within a single individual's values, and one can generally appeal to the parts which already acknowledge common values. Most fundamentalists can manage a certain acceptance of subjectivity in their hermeneutic for interpreting scripture, for example, so they can be talked down from the kind of absolutism which is ready to kill you for their faith.

DWill wrote:

geo wrote: One person may derive great spiritual comfort and inspiration from his/her “God” and another may find equal comfort from the arts or from nature or from being with loved ones.

I guess the comfort side is important; however, if we analogize literature with religion we won't emphasize comfort very much, but rather something different--maybe inspiration, maybe insight through empathy, but maybe even discomfort and unsettling of certain complacencies. With religion, too, the challenges and difficulties can be emphasized, and perhaps they even should be in order to avoid the harmful certitudes we often mention.

This strikes me as a well-formulated response. From early times literature has sought comfort more through catharsis than through building solidarity, but it does tend to build the solidarity of shared values by invoking them and illustrating them. Nihilistic or completely incoherent worldviews don't tend to make for very interesting stories, although we have some modern examples such as "Game of Thrones" who probe our values from a very cynical perspective on the use of power.

Music has more of comfort in it, including the comfort of commonality. Art moves between the two poles: representation for purposes of examination; but also engagement of human commonality by evoking the wonder of life.

Harry Marks wrote:. . . From early times literature has sought comfort more through catharsis than through building solidarity, but it does tend to build the solidarity of shared values by invoking them and illustrating them. Nihilistic or completely incoherent worldviews don't tend to make for very interesting stories, although we have some modern examples such as "Game of Thrones" who probe our values from a very cynical perspective on the use of power.

Music has more of comfort in it, including the comfort of commonality. Art moves between the two poles: representation for purposes of examination; but also engagement of human commonality by evoking the wonder of life.

Literature, to me, is comforting in the sense that it is universal. It moves us and reflects our commonalities, shows that we all share the same fears and desires, no matter what skin color or nationality or sex or time period we are born in. So we laugh out loud when we read Don Quixote, perhaps the oldest novel in Western literature. And we have a sense of awe and wonder at the Iliad, written about 8th century BC. I can relate to John Keats' On Chapman's Homer, a poem about experiencing a new translation of Homer. It is spiritually comforting to be connected to people who lived and died so long ago.

Learning about evolution brings out many of the same feelings for me. Knowing that all life forms evolved from a common ancestor. We are all connected, as hackneyed as that might sound.

DWill wrote:. . . I'm even a little cranky about the assumption of our moral evolution. I wouldn't have minded a good conservative take on how far we've come as a species. Who is meant by this morally advanced "we?" Are we so sure that we might not have become less advanced on some dimension?

I had this thought as well. But I also assumed that the "evolved" here means cultural. If Stephen Pinker is right, we may be more inclined to try to work out less violent solutions to our problems, but how much of this is simply due to conditions on the ground? Better economic opportunities, availability of food, access to health care, etc. Maybe we are better, but only because we can be.

geo wrote:Literature, to me, is comforting in the sense that it is universal. It moves us and reflects our commonalities, shows that we all share the same fears and desires, no matter what skin color or nationality or sex or time period we are born in. So we laugh out loud when we read Don Quixote, perhaps the oldest novel in Western literature. And we have a sense of awe and wonder at the Iliad, written about 8th century BC.

I think you have put your finger on a vital part of the universality. It isn't the same thing as solidarity, but it is certainly an excellent start on it. Something to do with us being fundamentally built the same, deep down.

geo wrote:It is spiritually comforting to be connected to people who lived and died so long ago.

Or to people in vastly different cultures and circumstances. There is a limit to how much "Things Fall Apart" can help us identify with Africa when the colonialists came, but it certainly bridges a huge gap.

I guess I am left wondering how much spiritual comfort that connection really provides, though. Some, I think, but not nearly as much as the experience of seeing results from empathy.

geo wrote:Learning about evolution brings out many of the same feelings for me. Knowing that all life forms evolved from a common ancestor. We are all connected, as hackneyed as that might sound.

Well, science in general, and the sense of awe we feel before it, is a powerful spiritual force. Just finished "All the Light We Cannot See," which is almost directly about that. We connect to people when we feel ourselves to be standing before the same awesome thing.

I think feeling connected through ancestry is vital as well. When people refused to believe they were "descended from apes" they were asserting something about themselves that is supposed to be comforting, (God created us to be special) but misses the dramatic common nature. Now that we may all go extinct together, the vulnerability we share with animals is beginning to matter a lot more.

geo wrote:I had this thought as well. But I also assumed that the "evolved" here means cultural. If Stephen Pinker is right, we may be more inclined to try to work out less violent solutions to our problems, but how much of this is simply due to conditions on the ground? Better economic opportunities, availability of food, access to health care, etc. Maybe we are better, but only because we can be.

Well, yes, that is definitely true. And if we are worse (stay tuned for possible devastation in Korea or Iran) it is also because now we can be. I tend to think that when the mass of people has the freedom to concern themselves with the question of what makes life worth living, then they set about trying to solve the hidden horrors that lurk in the shadows of our struggle.