https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XpEjVlPFrs
FYI: The proposal was that 'Religion has no place in the 21st century'.
My issue is with the last speaker, Douglas Murray, whom I found myself initially in agreement with. His argument I believe runs as follows:
1) Religion allows people to address questions of an existential nature
2) The general culture of today is unreflective and tends to bury these questions
3) Atheism/Scientific-rational discourse is not powerful enough to guarantee any everyday presence for existential questions
4) Exploring these questions is vitally important
Therefore: Religion cannot be discarded in favour of Atheism because religion provides much needed support for irreplaceable forms of questioning.
Corollary: The task facing an Atheism that wishes to replace or eradicate religion is political representation. With enough organisation, government lobbying, etc., perhaps in the future there can be 'a people' known as Atheists. Such a 'people' can gain and use power in order that they be able to let their truth shine through.
The corollary of the argument is of course quite a cop out. There is no reason why scientific truth and rational argument need to be put to any merely political test. However, that comment is of course trivial in the sense of the Realpolitik that is being called for. As it stands the argument is persuasive, and it would seem to be the case that I am being asked to 'put on hold' the hard consequences of sound scientific and philosophical thought, just so that the ground of such thought can be preserved long enough for it to have any real and lasting effect on society. If the people cannot question, they cannot know. The argument marks a real difference between the properly scientific activity of research and academic truth-seeking, and the ethical ambition to alter society to reflect known truths.
Religion must do a fairly good job in guaranteeing the right to pose certain questions, as it is, on the face of it, concerned very much with questions of death, the meaning of life, the origins of humankind, and so on. As Murray states in his speech, no matter how wrong the answers then given by religions may be, this predisposition towards existential matters cannot afford to be lost in a world otherwise hostile to them. I want to write a challenge to the argument, and have begun by adding a couple of caveats. The argument may be permitted so long as:
A) Religion does not bury the questions it invokes
B) The existential problems discussed through religion are genuine
If either A) or B) tends to be violated then I should have grounds to question why such discourse needs protecting, as it would in those instances not truly be the kind of questioning that Murray requires for satisfying atheists. For Murray needs to be indicating the kind of profound questioning capable of attaining to the most beautiful scientific understandings of the universe, and the place of human life within it (which happen to be very well expressed by Dawkins). In other words, the argument must engage the kind of questioning that can make a thoroughgoing atheistic naturalism posssible.
To take death as an example: It may be that the undeveloped encounter with death, such as the thought 'my father died, what is going on?', is a natural ground for any scientific understanding of life and death that may subsequently emerge. Put another way, the kind of well developed science that can describe the physical forces, such as gravity, at work shaping animals' differing lifespans according to their size, can be thought of as emerging from original points of wonder, curiousity and seemingly insoluble problems that arise in human existence, such as the simple experience of the deaths of others. The scientific viewpoint can then perhaps offer the consolation that human beings have a certain range for their natural life cycles, and death from old age really should not surprise them, and to a good extent these considerations (along with others) will help people to realise that their own inevitable demise should be just as unsurprising. There is, then, a certain vitally important message in the natural sciences that depicts a bridge across the millenia from states of initial curiosity, wonder, and fear, to understanding. The question I want to ask is whether such a bridge can truly extend out from or through religion. Here are some points to consider:
With regards to A): Religion does not so much offer ways to freely explore the concept of death as to impose a view of death via some authority or convention of thought. If a problem with death is truly apprehended, then for religion it is either truly expressed in faith or it isn't. Sucks to be you.
With regards to B): Do philosophical issues and problems concerning death get broached in religious discourse in the first place? Or does religion instead focus on eliciting and structuring the emotional experiences and needs of people undergoing loss? If someone close to you dies, you want to know where that person has gone, so religion talks about that, in one way or another. Confronted with the question 'what is the meaning of death?', no minister of religion would throw up his hands and say 'we don't know yet, what do you think?'. I fancy that, on the contrary, ministers of religion talk about spirit or somesuch, and conjure ways to replace any germ of philosophical thinking with whatever superstition is favoured by the history of their religion.
The argument is also put regularly to atheists that religion consoles, that it offers a support for all the big difficulties in life, whether this is through general religious culture or through the shared experiences of religious communities. Why is it never countered that these needs, under the auspices of religious thought, are always stated and developed as so much superstition? For so long as people are conditioned and prompted to respond superstitiously to life, how is the actual event of death, or anything else for that matter, ever likely to emerge as something truly problematic, and capable of receiving philosophical relief?
In short, perhaps religion does not offer the space and support that Murray asserts that it does, even if on the surface of things the mere fact that countless people go to church to pray deeply about something or other offers evidence for this view. For you may regularly go to church for the rest of your life in order to to cope with loss, but you will never reach understanding so long as answers are simply given, or expected, and already anticipated within an arbitrary frame of thought. I want to know, therefore, what constitutes fertile ground for thinking within religion, and I want to be able to match that up with scientific understanding. If that cannot be done, and I believe it cannot and that science and religion travel in two different directions - one to life, and the other to death - then I cannot accept arguments such as Murray's that seek to ;give the devil his due'. There is a burden of proof that needs to be satisfied, and for me this issue was decided long ago in a million different ways.
V
FYI: The proposal was that 'Religion has no place in the 21st century'.
My issue is with the last speaker, Douglas Murray, whom I found myself initially in agreement with. His argument I believe runs as follows:
1) Religion allows people to address questions of an existential nature
2) The general culture of today is unreflective and tends to bury these questions
3) Atheism/Scientific-rational discourse is not powerful enough to guarantee any everyday presence for existential questions
4) Exploring these questions is vitally important
Therefore: Religion cannot be discarded in favour of Atheism because religion provides much needed support for irreplaceable forms of questioning.
Corollary: The task facing an Atheism that wishes to replace or eradicate religion is political representation. With enough organisation, government lobbying, etc., perhaps in the future there can be 'a people' known as Atheists. Such a 'people' can gain and use power in order that they be able to let their truth shine through.
The corollary of the argument is of course quite a cop out. There is no reason why scientific truth and rational argument need to be put to any merely political test. However, that comment is of course trivial in the sense of the Realpolitik that is being called for. As it stands the argument is persuasive, and it would seem to be the case that I am being asked to 'put on hold' the hard consequences of sound scientific and philosophical thought, just so that the ground of such thought can be preserved long enough for it to have any real and lasting effect on society. If the people cannot question, they cannot know. The argument marks a real difference between the properly scientific activity of research and academic truth-seeking, and the ethical ambition to alter society to reflect known truths.
Religion must do a fairly good job in guaranteeing the right to pose certain questions, as it is, on the face of it, concerned very much with questions of death, the meaning of life, the origins of humankind, and so on. As Murray states in his speech, no matter how wrong the answers then given by religions may be, this predisposition towards existential matters cannot afford to be lost in a world otherwise hostile to them. I want to write a challenge to the argument, and have begun by adding a couple of caveats. The argument may be permitted so long as:
A) Religion does not bury the questions it invokes
B) The existential problems discussed through religion are genuine
If either A) or B) tends to be violated then I should have grounds to question why such discourse needs protecting, as it would in those instances not truly be the kind of questioning that Murray requires for satisfying atheists. For Murray needs to be indicating the kind of profound questioning capable of attaining to the most beautiful scientific understandings of the universe, and the place of human life within it (which happen to be very well expressed by Dawkins). In other words, the argument must engage the kind of questioning that can make a thoroughgoing atheistic naturalism posssible.
To take death as an example: It may be that the undeveloped encounter with death, such as the thought 'my father died, what is going on?', is a natural ground for any scientific understanding of life and death that may subsequently emerge. Put another way, the kind of well developed science that can describe the physical forces, such as gravity, at work shaping animals' differing lifespans according to their size, can be thought of as emerging from original points of wonder, curiousity and seemingly insoluble problems that arise in human existence, such as the simple experience of the deaths of others. The scientific viewpoint can then perhaps offer the consolation that human beings have a certain range for their natural life cycles, and death from old age really should not surprise them, and to a good extent these considerations (along with others) will help people to realise that their own inevitable demise should be just as unsurprising. There is, then, a certain vitally important message in the natural sciences that depicts a bridge across the millenia from states of initial curiosity, wonder, and fear, to understanding. The question I want to ask is whether such a bridge can truly extend out from or through religion. Here are some points to consider:
With regards to A): Religion does not so much offer ways to freely explore the concept of death as to impose a view of death via some authority or convention of thought. If a problem with death is truly apprehended, then for religion it is either truly expressed in faith or it isn't. Sucks to be you.
With regards to B): Do philosophical issues and problems concerning death get broached in religious discourse in the first place? Or does religion instead focus on eliciting and structuring the emotional experiences and needs of people undergoing loss? If someone close to you dies, you want to know where that person has gone, so religion talks about that, in one way or another. Confronted with the question 'what is the meaning of death?', no minister of religion would throw up his hands and say 'we don't know yet, what do you think?'. I fancy that, on the contrary, ministers of religion talk about spirit or somesuch, and conjure ways to replace any germ of philosophical thinking with whatever superstition is favoured by the history of their religion.
The argument is also put regularly to atheists that religion consoles, that it offers a support for all the big difficulties in life, whether this is through general religious culture or through the shared experiences of religious communities. Why is it never countered that these needs, under the auspices of religious thought, are always stated and developed as so much superstition? For so long as people are conditioned and prompted to respond superstitiously to life, how is the actual event of death, or anything else for that matter, ever likely to emerge as something truly problematic, and capable of receiving philosophical relief?
In short, perhaps religion does not offer the space and support that Murray asserts that it does, even if on the surface of things the mere fact that countless people go to church to pray deeply about something or other offers evidence for this view. For you may regularly go to church for the rest of your life in order to to cope with loss, but you will never reach understanding so long as answers are simply given, or expected, and already anticipated within an arbitrary frame of thought. I want to know, therefore, what constitutes fertile ground for thinking within religion, and I want to be able to match that up with scientific understanding. If that cannot be done, and I believe it cannot and that science and religion travel in two different directions - one to life, and the other to death - then I cannot accept arguments such as Murray's that seek to ;give the devil his due'. There is a burden of proof that needs to be satisfied, and for me this issue was decided long ago in a million different ways.
V
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