Two highly recommended Bloggingheads.tv below the fold on religion. First, the cognitive science of religion in Why Are We Religious?, and second religion & conservatism in God and Man on the Right. My co-blogger at Secular Right, Heather Mac Donald, is getting into it with a future columnist for The New York Times.
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Just out of curiosity, why are you using the alias "David Hume" on the Secular Right blog. Is it a reference to the 18th century Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, and political theorist named: David Hume?
yes. as evidenced by this page:
http://secularright.org/wordpress/?page_id=2
and the favicon.
Now that you said it, I can see what the favicon is. But prior to that, I didn't know what it was :-)
Razib,
I am an agnostic Christian, practising a kind of religious Machiavellianism. It is perfectly possible for an agnostic to hypocritically use religion to advance sensible and worthy ethical values, with a spiritual gloss. That would be the religious persuasion of most nice people in the West over the past hundred years or so.
I like religion for three reasons.
1. It has the correct ethical goal. Namely immortality of the soul or consciousness. Secular liberals seem to have given up the ghost in this respect. Aquinas at least addressed the question intellectually, which puts him miles ahead of Dawkins, Russell et al even before the starting gun goes off.
2. It uses a proven neurological pathway. Pricking our conscience utilises empathic vision when we are faced with a moral dilemma. Of course its possible to do the conscience thing without invoking God. But He provides a kind of pervasive CCTV which makes sure we are not cheating.
3. It has developed effective institutional formations. Religious churches and schools have been around for aeons and understand the interaction between human nature and social structure. Especially in by way of internalising good rules to harness team-work to get good works done.
The most profound moral analysts of the post-Enlightenment had this figured out more than a century ago.
Durkheim argued that âGod is society, writ large.â
Smith argued that âSociety is...the mirror in which one catches sight of oneself, morally speaking.â
Put the two arguements together and one derives the conclusion that:
"God is the mirror in which one catches the reflection of all people in society."
By this means we universalise our empathy for others and also universalise others monitoring of our conduct.
It may be that "God" is just a conjurors trick ("Holy Smoke and Mirrors"!). But it is effective in getting people to behave better than they otherwise would.
Secular ethicists have developed alternative practices to religious indoctrination, namely personal therapy (Freud) and political correctness (Foucault). How's that working out?
The evidence shows that religion reduces social pathology, the more so the further down the social scale/Bell Curve. This study showed:
This is a very cost-effective way of getting people to be nice. Plus one gets some nice art thrown into the deal. Not a bad deal for a social contract.
Hey, Jack, nice play at a Noble Lie. Gives the priestly class a lot of power and subjugates the masses at the same time. Get to make up whatever scripturation is needed to fit whatever the authority needs the masses to conform to.
Somebody recently wrote that there is utility in creationism. I think it was Ronald Bailey...
It's just too bad that there are so many conflicts among the existing priestly class is to which are the "right" rules and which are the heresies. I think it could lead to wars.
Put the two arguements together and one derives the conclusion that:
this is why i don't argue with you jack. you take assertions by scholars decades (or centuries) dead, and start cranking the deductive engines :-) as someone used to say, check your premises.
I keep seeing the idea that morality is intimately connected to religion in some necessary functional sense (instead of perhaps an incidental cultural sense). This doesn't appear to be true. Religion is not connected to morality among hunter-gatherers, and this is the context where it fundamentally evolved.
The breakdown of religion, and its possible behavioral consequences, is less alarming because it is connected to economic development in a fairly predictable manner. Whatever debatable social consequences we've seen from the breakdown is more than made up for in the objective increase in quality of life it seems to follow.
Many people assume this breakdown will eventually reverse since religious people have more children, and religiousness is moderately heritable. I think this is a fundamentally flawed reading of the situation. Specific religious creeds are in fact almost entirely passed on through parents, and the secular creed is the easiest one to transmit. Secular people in Europe may well be more genetically religious than ever, but they channel it into ever-more vague forms of spiritualism instead of Christianity and similar organized, traditional religions. Whatever subjective experiences numinous cognition may induce, it does not, apparently, require the superstitious auxiliary beliefs Western Christians would like to believe it does.
The pseudo-scientific, anti-liberal religions, no matter what their fertility, will likely be out-paced by the march of technological-economic development and its consequent push for secular, materialist thinking (and more than anything Flynn has shown this is what the Flynn Effect represents, not an increase in intelligence, but in scientific thinking).
Your Christian grandchildren will probably be more Unitarian than ever. Francis Collins will look like a religious fundamentalist in 75 years.
Jack - Just as a contradictory data point, the homicide rate in England has gone down by 4000% since the 1300s, but very few people argue that the population is more religious now than in the fourteenth century.
If religion has the effect you're proposing, it seems to be swamped by other effects.
Posted by: razib | April 13, 2009 10:44 PM
I suppose you are going to tell me that Weber's anaysis of the Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism is completely old-hat.
Darwin, Hayek and Bayes are long dead. Does that mean we ignore sexual selection, distributed intelligence and subjective probability. Conversely, Baudrillard and Derrida are alive and kicking. Anyone for up for some deconstruction?
Your approach to social analysis suffers from ignorance of the tradition of grand theory. You can learn something from standing on the shoulders of giants.
Specifically, Durkheims work is undergoing a revival now that the effects of radical de-religionated anomie are being felt all over the place. eg post-Soviet Russia and remote indigenous communities.
And Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is defininitely getting renewed interest, particularly from those exploring the reciprocal altruistism model of morality.
This stuff is not just of academic interest. People want to know about morality because they sense that there has been a moral decline over recent generations. Personal and professional ethics have gotten worse, not better, over the past few decades. (Political ethics dont count as much, as they are subject to historical relativism and Machiavellian tactics.)
Everyone older than 40 years of age knows this without having to read a manual on social psychology. Although it wouldnt hurt some whipper-snappers to revisit the classics.
This moral decline is suspiciously co-incidental to the decline in religious observance. Why else do you think we have a plague of expensive lawyers replacing the much cheaper priest class in order to enforce our agreements. The decline of the Christian gentlemans agreement, maybe? Perhaps thats why we trust little old ladies?
razib says:
Read what I wrote. I pointed to an inductive survey which concluded that religion did have socio-empathic effects. I will quote it back to you so you have no excuses this time:
More generally, your philosophical criticism betrays a naivety about the applicability of natural science methods to social analysis.
In the social sciences, grand-theoretically speaking, there is nothing much new under the sun. A great number of the profound social truths are in the classics, which generally do not do much more than prove water runs down hill. Likewise novelists.
Quite the opposite case prevails in the natural sciences. Here we are constantly peeling back new layers of reality which require constant revisions and revolutions in unifying theories.
Popperians used to explain this paradox by saying:
- In social science, moving from abstract to concrete, we explain the known by reference to the unknown. ie unobserved (partial equilibrium analysis of a market) deductively explain the observed (movement in the price of apples),
- In natural science, moving from concrete to abstract, we explain the unknown by reference to the known. ie observed (falling apples) inductively explain the unobserved (gravitons).
In that sense, we long ago got to "the End of (purely) Social Science". The arrival of the socio-biological sciences filled the gap. Bridged by Hamilton, Maynard Smith and Williams, using game theory (devised by economists actually.)
None of this is to downplay the use of mathematical models to crunch inductively gathered data on social behaviour. Its just that we do have intuitive understanding of human action. So why not use the general theories based on that intuition that are already at hand?
razib says:
Been dusting off faded copies of Ayn Rand have we? Talk about relying upon "assertions by scholars decades...dead!
You and godless have been parrotting the Dennett-Dawkins-PZ Myers anti-religion line for the better part of a decade. Its looking a little tired, dated and hysterical - a kind of mirror image of the Evangelical nutsos that dominate the political Right in the US.
A while back in the Edge H Allen Orr made mincemeat of these aging hippies with "problems with authority" chips weakening their slouching schoolboy shoulders. You really dont want to be caught dead in public associating with such embarassing stuff.
You might find yourself making more headway in this issue if you brought yourself up to speed on the latest neuro anthropological research into the evolution of religious behaviour.. Some of this looks suspiciously like it could have been written by Durkheims ghost. This paper on Supernaturalizing and the evolution of social cooperation for instance:
New Scientists, Science Daily and Nicholas Wade are bringing up stuff about the evolutionary basis for religion every other day. Here are some more links to path breaking research that should gladden your inductive heart.
Does religion make people generous?
Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests
'Theory of mind' could help explain belief in God
Religion a figment of human imagination
Religion May Have Evolved Because Of Its Ability To Help People Exercise Self-control
Religion Makes People Helpful And Generous -- Under Certain Conditions
The whole point of the Hamilton-Trivers-Axelrod revolution was to exlain the evolution of morality, based on a frank understanding of our paeleo-antrhopological nature. And here you are chanting the liberal secularist mantra in complete indifference to this revival of evolutionary explanations of religiously-based morality.
More to the point, have you considered the absolutely fundamental relationship between religious concern with sexual morality and the evolutionary function of sexual selection? Religious institutions function as dating agencies as well as contract enforcers. Perhaps we dont need them anymore now we have the internet. No doubt thats why there is such a little demand for IVF and DNA tests. [irony alert]
If you keep this up I may be forced to agitate to have your socio-biological licence revoked.
Update: On re-reading the above it comes off as a tad snarky, bombastic and self-righteous. So I do regret having pushed the "post" button before toning it down.
We are all in razib's debt for the yeomen's work he does in ploughing the fields of knowledge that lie between sociology and biology. And admire his character for cocking a snook at political correctors and religious scolds. I certainly have not earned the right to condescend to him, yet.
My main intellectual concern is to show the continuity of interest between that the founders of both sociology and socio-biology. Smith, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, no less than Hamilton, Maynard-Smith and Axelrod, were interested in explaining the evolution of morality.
It is pretty obvious that emergence of religious institutions is fundamental to the sanctification of social co-operation. And to the moralisation of sexual selection, which is the primary mechanism that decides who you will be co-operating with.
We therefore need to take religion seriously as an anthropological problem. Unfortunately in the US religion has become a political football tied up with the success of everyones favourite policy and party.
How wise it was for the founder of our religion to advise his followers that "my kingdom is not of this world".