Over the last few month I’ve provided some of the common reasons why many people fail to believe in gods or God. I’ve talked about different kinds of atheism, about how evidence and how it does not lead to God, about how God isn’t necessary to living, about how some of the common argument for God are not convincing for me, the Problem of Evil, science as a better way of explaining things and about the lack of meaning in the term “God”. Last week I looked briefly at God belief as a function of the mind. This week I look at God belief as a function of society.
Human beings are social animals. We have evolved to function well in groups and have created ideas to reinforce social cohesion. Religion and belief in a god who watches us and judges our actions is a way to fulfil these functions in society. The actual non-existence or existence of a god are secondary to the social function that religion has.
In the 19th century Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher, suggested that God was ”In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object” or that God was merely a way for human beings to express the concept of infinity onto a supernatural being. We conjure the anthropological form of God to explain that which eludes our explanation.
Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, also expressed the idea that religion was a product of human society. Religion has many useful social functions. Group cohesion is maintained through shared worship and shared moral ideas. Religious ritual draws a group together in performing a social function and allows for individual members of the group to experience a mental state similar to other members. This, in turn, creates a feedback loop where the good feelings in shared religious worship are self promoting and helpful to maintaining the group structure and integrity.
What Durkheim claimed though is that there is nothing more to religious expression than the reinforcement of group beliefs and the collective conscience. His claim was that the supernatural simply did not exist and any religious experience arising from the ritualisation of the belief was simply the result of a heightened state of mental arousal.
Durkheim condensed religion into four major functions:
Supernatural agents were not required. “God is society, writ large”
Karl Marx considered the supernatural including God as illusory and religion to be a force that held human society back. As a social institution the prevailing faith reflected the society that the dominant order in the society seeks to maintain. The ruling classes make use of the faith of the masses to maintain their elevated position and curtail social movement and rebellion. The majority working classes are therefore oppressed by the enforcement of a shared delusionary belief system. The illusion that religion offers: joys to come after death; stoicism in the face of adversity; righteousness in oppression. These are distractions that keep the workers from forcing social upheaval to make their lives better.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
- Karl Marx
He didn’t stop there though. Marx considered the positive aspects of religion to be a theft from the common man. Charity, honesty, beauty, self sacrifice, bravery, these positive traits and more were granted to a supernatural agency as the noblest of ideals. In doing so humanity was robbed of all that made it good and forced to rely upon an outside force rather than upon ourselves. We cannot achieve greatness or reach our potential while we defer our best qualities to thing apart from our own humanity.
Furthermore, by providing an illusion of happiness through religion the will to combat the social and economic oppression of the workers was denied. He argued that only by rejecting religion could the genuine happiness of the masses be achieved. Social wrongs were allowed to continue unopposed because the religion allowed them to occur and made these slights bearable.
I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as Marx in his assessment. Nor do I believe that religion is a conscious tool of the ruling classes. I can certainly see it as something that can and does prevent some people from living as fulfilling a life as they can. Religion is also a powerful force in any society and it doesn’t take an atheist to express the view that this isn’t always a positive force.
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts, Jason | 23 Comments »Over the last few month I’ve provided some of the common reasons why many people fail to believe in gods or God. I’ve talked about different kinds of atheism, about how evidence and how it does not lead to God, about how God isn’t necessary to living, about how some of the common argument for God are not convincing for me, the Problem of Evil, science as a better way of explaining things and about the lack of meaning in the term “God”. There are a few more reasons to go and this is one that I personally put a good deal of stock in.
Religion exists throughout almost all cultures on Earth. To my mind that leads to three possible conclusions.
The idea of a shared culture I think is safe to rule out. I doubt that any faith would accept that their interpretation is a corruption of a central idea and I doubt that there is evidence of humanity diverging geographically at a cultural stage where gods were a commonality. The differences in god ideas throughout history and cultures is proof that their is no central idea beyond a belief in a cosmic “something” and that is too vague to be satisfactory.
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In reading and discussing scripture I often find myself at a loss to understand the meaning of what I am reading. It isn’t that the words and teachings don’t make sense but that there is an underlying assumption that I have somehow missed. Talk of God’s grace and goodness confounds me because I have no basis other than the text and conversations to understand this and this is precicely where I find the confusion.
Religious language is rich with these assumptions. As a technical person I classify religious language as a kind of jargon. Jargon is wonderful. I love jargon. It is a way of passing information to others in your field quickly and efficiently. The problem that many have with jargon is that to requires a considerable amount of time and effort to comprehend and use. You need to be proficient in the jargon to use it. My lack of understanding of scripture may well be due to my lack of proficiency in the jargon of faith. However, I’ve been reading and talking about religion for long enough that I should have picked up the basics by now, no matter how obtuse I am.
There is another explanation supported by Relative Philosophy. Religious language, according to relativism doesn’t mean anythign at all. As it lacks any form of meaning there is no point in seeking answers to the questions that it raises. The God question is blithely dismissed as meaningless. Of course relativism can be contrasted by absolutism and monotheism can certainly be interpreted as a form of absolutism. So when Genesis 1: 1 says
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
a philosopher can apply relativism to it and state that it is neither true nor false, that it is without meaning.
In philosophy relatism is hardly alone in dismissing the idea of God as lacking meaning. Logical Positivism does more or less the same by applying a kind of logic test to the text. Can an assertion be tested by an experiment or can it be true by definition? “God” does not fall into these categories and so can be dismissed as meaningless. There are no tests to verify the existence of God and God is not true by definition in the same way that “green is a colour” or “a square has four sides” is true. To a logical positivists the question is meaningless since it could not be answered true or false.
By extension any metaphysical discussion centred around God is also meaningless. I find this to be unhelpful as I don’t like to dismiss an argument until I’ve explored it thoroughly. Logical positivism and relativism in this regard make no effort to explore metaphysics but dismiss them utterly. Personally I like to know what I’m rejecting and actualyl enjoy tying myself up in knots before I realise that I should have rejected the question to begin with. That leaves us to explore what is meant by “God” and whether what we mean by “God” actually exists. Which is much more fun. However I can see how an apatheist could use logical positivism or relativism to dismiss these questions.
If you explore logical positivism you’ll quickly find A J Ayer’s objection to it.
We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express-that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
“Freddie” acknowledged that no physical proof is ever completely conclusive. There are margins of error, false positives, experimental error, etc to contend with not to mention the philosophical idea of deceipt that cannot ever be fully rejected. If evidence through experimentation is not conclusive as an absolute then everything that we purport to know about the world becomes meaningless.
Those interested in the philosophy of science may also follow Richard Dawkins’ arguments on the improbability of God although he centres his point on evolution and ignores as irrelevant metaphysical questions. A J Ayer is much neater in his dismissal:
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts, Jason | 5 Comments »…There can be no way of proving that the existence of a god…is even probable.
“For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone.
“But in fact this is not possible…For to say that “God Exists” is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false.