The problem with Richard Dawkins’ speculation that “Perhaps I am a Pollyanna to believe that people would remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God” is that, if his own theory is correct, people actually are unobserved and unpoliced by God, but nevertheless have achieved the sum total of human suffering and evil across the centuries.
If God does not, in fact, exist, if I grant his thesis, that doesn’t change history. All that occurred without God. And if your try to explain away the basic historical facts and preserve his thesis that not only is God not present but was never necessary, how do you explain human evil? His attempt to explain it seems to be the curious proposition that the only reason we couldn’t be perfectly good in a world without God, was because of the belief in God.
This is a very odd theory to posit as the origin of all human evil. Especially when it has been able to arise under such differing circumstances across all cultures and time and individuals, regardless of belief. And isn’t it strange that the entire explanatory power for human evil is to be laid at the feet of the contention that there is something objective about moral reality to which our behavior should conform (ie divine law, however you conceive it).
In a way, I suppose he is right. Absent any concept of divine law (however you see it as descending, just any theory of objective teleology, some theory of ought), evil as a cognitive category does effectively cease to exist. It no longer becomes a coherent descriptor. We don’t talk about animals being evil. They do what they feel they need to do, what works, what is necessary, what they wish, without any theoretical consideration if what they ought to do because of a theory about the nature and teleology of their existence.
Unfortunately, expunging evil as a cognitive category by eliminating religion wouldn’t actually alter our experiences or history, any more than deciding God doesn’t, in fact, exist, removes the fact of all the evils that happened despite his not existing. We may have come up with a good theory for removing the idea and definitions of good and evil, but not the human facts to which those categories pertain. The idea that “good” will somehow “persist” or even have much meaning as concept outside an individual theory of what it is and what it means is, indeed, optimistic.
In practice, good will persist, as will evil, whatever changes you declare must be made to human ideology. As they have persisted across so many times and cultures and religions, whether the gods they espoused existed or were forgotten. Whatever your metaphysical beliefs, God, good, and evil are not removable cognitive categories from human cognition. You can redefine them according to your personal theory about them, you can alter them, paint them, dress them up, deny them, enshrine them, qualify them, explain them, practice them, love them, hate them, embrace them, or reject them. But you can’t remove them.
In a way Dawkins’ contention is true. The existence of the cognitive category of religion, of a definite nature to man and to the world, a theory of teleology arising from our ability to use choice to respond to it, and an attendant moral calculus we use in addressing and assessing how we navigate it, are in fact responsible for the categories we call human good and human evil. They arise from it by necessity.
Unfortunately, you cannot remove religion and expect either good or evil to persist as categories. Removing the part of us that we call religion would be to abolish humanity itself and cast us back into the premoral darkness of animal instinct and action. You would have to remove our knowledge and agency. You would have to un-eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Understanding and agency are what produce the cognitive concept of religion, what make it possible. And although you may succeed at dispelling and pulling down the house of some individual gods, especially those poorly or weakly described, you cannot pull down the category of God itself, religion per se, without pulling humanity itself down on top of you, Samson-like. Those twin pillars support the roof of human goodness and achievement, as well as conceal (or perhaps reveal?) the dungeon of human evil and suffering.
You might, I suppose, challenge how the idea of God is represented to people, how they choose to concieve of and relate to its precepts and concepts and exigencies. That’s more akin to finding different or better artistic representations for an idea than it is an alteration of the idea itself. You’re changing the words but not the grammar, the literary figures but not the archetypes. However methods of representation may change to present an idea in fresh and relevant ways for different people and different times and cultures, the underlying subject (of religion itself) remains the same yesterday, today, and forever.
People care about what the world is. They care about what people are. They care about what they could do. And they care about what they out to do. Religion, much like science, is the result of long periods of experience among humans yielding a working theory that helps answer those theoretical questions, as well as a practical. Science may be a method, but its work and the mechanisms that make it possible (experience, theory, intention, agency, motivated goals) are shared with religion.
You can’t have a functional informational system absent values and goals. And the effective scale of your informational system is directly dependent on and directly related to the scale of your value system. This isn’t just a fact of human psychology, it’s a problem even for fields like artificial intelligence and robotics. In a world of massive potential undifferentiated input, filtering according to goals is necessary for the structuring of input, long before one even comes to the question of output.
Small, simple forms of life have very limited value systems, and their informational systems are tailored appropriately to match and serve the understanding (such as it is) and execution of those goals. Life, being defined fundamentally by purposiveness and information, can be identified and described at its most basic levels of mere stimulus and response, and the biological mechanisms that engage in gathering the relevant information and responding to it to fulfill its inherent purposes.
As we move up the ladder of complexity, we find larger and more complex structures of purpose, and larger and more complex informational systems, and larger and more complex biological systems (and eventually superbiological, trans-individual, trans-temporal systems) to manage all that business. In the human animal, we find layer on top of layer on top of layer of complexity, different systems maintaining different functions so the whole collection of systems can be maintained, enormous amounts of information being stored and processed on a basic biological level.
And in the human brain we find ever more complex and sophisticated biological mechanisms supporting ever more complex informational systems devoted to ever more complex purposes. A fairly simple (comparatively, in fact enormously complex by our standards, but not by nature’s) mechanism, with an even more complex mechanism layered on top of that, with an insanely complex machine on top of that, with something so complex on top of that it isn’t even recognizable as a mechanism any more, passing the boundaries of our understanding).
Figuring out which way is the right way round to look at the whole process has been a tricky matter. All three elements exist: purpose, information, mechanism. But in what way they can be said to exist and how they are embodied and how they interact is very tricky to concieve of. The physical sciences have been largely concerned with the mechanisms. But from the perspective of lived human experience throughout history, we have largely been concerned with the other two.
At the same time, unlocking the mysteries of one (as much as we have) hasn’t sufficed to eliminate or relieve us from the problem of the other two, which remain the principal objects of human attention and effort once the basic proper functioning of the mechanisms has been provided for. Health is a wonderful thing to have, but only a coherent concept insofar as we understand that there is some state of how things ought to be, some purpose that is served, toward which health enables us. We don’t talk about healthy rocks, because rocks have no particular goals toward which their structure is either succeeding or failing to succeed at advancing them.
Going back to the matter of informational systems, religions, particularly the expansive, sophisticated religions of certain ancients such as the Hebrews served to expand our informational systems. They created the systems that make our modern life and knowledge possible. By setting the world itself, and all the complex behavior of expanding, interacting, and also individual humanity, as a consistent and intelligible system able to be studied and understood and acted upon, as its object, the philosophies of the Greeks and Hebrews altered our world. By centering around an expansive concept of purpose, they developed an expansive system of information to service that concept. And by collecting that information they were able to develop and refine the mechanisms that today support our vastly expanded biological community and complexity.
Their idea of God set the standard of universal conceptual purpose as something almost infinitely high and deep and far reaching, running from the highest extent within and even outside time down to the smallest human affairs. And it affirmed the ideas of intelligibility, that we could know God (the nature of being, of goodness), and agency, that we could effect to pursue or not pursue him (the nature of being and goodness).
The Hebrews found ways to represent this vast truth to themselves, but unlike many other cultures were very cautious not to fall too in love with the representations, in case they might be mistaken for the reality itself and thus the reality be maligned by being confined to something so small and finite and temporal. Thus the many strictures against idolatry and the making of graven images, inadequate pictures, the works of men’s hands. Thus the caution about even speaking the name of God, and the extremely curious nature of it. This is a supposedly unsophisticated, stupid, gullible ancient people who thought all kinds of dumb, superstitious things (which we would never do), who expressed the name of their god in something much closer to an abstract philosophical statement (I am that I am) than a personification of a big, bearded man in the sky.
Despite what Dawkin’s asserts, there are enormous reservoirs of knowledge, theory, and practice to be found in all religions, the ideas and projects that powered those civilizations. Thus there are wonderful things to discover in the representations of those theories and strategies in the religions of great civilizations like the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Norse, Nahuatl, Chinese, and so on. The amount of the world they tried to address and the success of their practicum in addressing the problems they encountered were very impressive. And among many of them it isn’t hard to discern common threads and conclusions about human experience, divided by time and distance as they may be. There are also some matters of serious debate and disagreement, as different as quantum theory is from string theory is from general relativity, as different as communism and capitalism.
All such systems that worked well enough as maps to ensure the survival of their peoples have some value, and those maps that succeeded in providing great advantages even in varied and difficult circumstances are particularly worth looking at. Consistency and scalability are also important. How well does a complex theory of being integrate the numerous complex systems that make up human life and concern? How much is it able to be applied to new situations and new problems and new information? Is there some important dimension of life that it ignores?
I’ve talked elsewhere about what the line between a philosophy and a religion is. And it’s largely a matter of scale and representation, more like the difference between towns and cities or clans and countries than anything else. There isn’t any hard qualitative barrier of content between them. The questions to ask are, how does this system of thought represent itself to us, and to what degree has it developed to address, integrate, and be expressed in all the various dimensions of human life? There are many philosophies that are essentially indistinguishable from religions, and in fact the larger and more developed and expressed a philosophy becomes, the more it begins to cross that threshold of critical mass.
As an idea develops and becomes more and more seated as an essential element for understanding and navigating the universe, it attracts all the different kinds of people with all the different concerns and talents to develop expressions to carry that idea into that realm of life. As humans are very visual and very narrative-driven, this will likely mean the development of works of art and stories to help represent the idea and its practicum to the people.
It has been said that all speech is political. And although I don’t agree with all the assumptions and implications of such a view, I would argue that all fiction is mythological. All stories we tell are an attempt to boil life down to a coherent vision of or interpretation of life and action in the world, and to represent some part of that vision to ourselves. Scrape away the surface level sufficiently, and the archetypes will emerge, the connections to the universal experience we all share and struggle with.
The most skillful stories will embody those concepts and strategies and lay them onto life in such a way that seems real and tangible and authentic and alive to us. They will seem almost like something real and alive, to have captured the animus of the conceptual purpose behind human reality, a spirit that touches our own. We will see our own lives lived in something that is in actuality merely a representation, and we will attempt to live our lives more authentically within the spirit of that representation.
Perhaps this represents too haunted a universe for some people’s tastes. But, from the perspective of humans, it seems hard to avoid such a haunted universe. The world is haunted by a strange and bizzare spirit, and that spirit is life itself, in all its bizzare and various forms, not least of which is ourselves. Purpose and information, structure and intention haunt the physical universe like boogeyman between the walls of reality. We aren’t even sure how they fit in to such a place, only that they seem to be.
None of all of this is a direct argument that religion, as such, is merely a construct of invention and isn’t, in the colloquial sense, real or true. Our understanding of and articulation of and communication of a religion is an entirely different question from the ontological status of the reality that underlies its assertions. Religion is, in some sense, exactly the purest example of a human institution. It’s fundamentally human. So fundamental that it can be found nowhere else in the universe, nor, were you to try to remove or correct for it, could you do so without removing humanity itself. But as human as religion is, it’s objects are not themselves purely human. They are fundamental objects of human concern, but are not themselves human objects.
It might be the case that different religions have different effects on the mode of being of those who follow them precisely because they more or less accurately reflect the underlying reality of the world and human experience and the proper mode for human being. That certainly seems to be the contention religions make. Maybe there’s something in it all. And if there isn’t, it’s not clear that there’s really anything else that were doing. This seems to be our primary, unique contribution to the world, the thing we bring to existence. If the pursuit of religion is no longer to be an essential part of human activity, it is not clear what our remaining activity will be, or how it could be understood as human, of why we would need humans for whatever remainder endured.
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