George Eliot on God and the Good

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face;

And Love, the human form divine;

And Peace, the human dress.

The lines above, written by William Blake in his poem Innocence, are given to us by George Eliot at the opening of chapter 76 of Middlemarch. It is in this chapter that Lydgate confesses to Dorothea, and in which Dorothea promises to help Lydgate in any way she can. The emphasis they place on the human is striking, and they echo one of the central messages found throughout George Eliot’s work; that it is through human actions and human feelings that we see “good”, and that this good should be driven by feeling for our fellow humans.

In this essay I will look at the treatment by Eliot of the “good” and human righteousness, both in her fiction and in her critical writings. I will explore the relationship that she saw between the source of morality and its application, and discuss the place for God that Eliot had in this picture.

Religious Experience

Religious experiences of one description or another are often used as justification for belief in the existence of God. Personal experience, powerful, immediate and direct, convinces individuals easily; we are prone to trust in the reliability of our senses and feelings. However, there is a more important question to be asked then whether experience is used to provide some form of justification for belief in God. Does religious experience provide epistemic justification? Can we form true beliefs on the basis of an experience of God? We know that our senses are capable of deceiving us – do they do so in the case of religious experiences?

In this essay I will briefly examine some of the recent history of the discussion on religious experience, before discussing problems with the use of religious experience to provide epistemic justification. In particular, I will examine an argument put forward by Zangwill that undermines a fundamental premise of the argument from religious experience.

Theology Essay 3 – Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election

The third essay in my theology portfolio. This time I’m looking at Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Election”.

The comment here from the lecturer is that:

you don’t bring out the Trinitarian roots of what he’s saying. God’s expressiveness is directed towards being a source of self-gift to the world, and the focus of this is Israel, within which Jesus who embodies God’s love efficaciously,conveys the final form of God’s presence as love. Integration of Trinity and Christology is important, but you don’t bring that out.

I think the reason I didn’t deal with these things is that despite trying I honestly a) don’t understand what on earth this means, and b) don’t feel that I can write like that and retain intellectual honesty. So I present my take on Karl Barth…

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Karl Barth comes from a reformed perspective. He holds that we can only know (and talk) about God by considering the logos, or word of God. This comes in three forms: Jesus (through the incarnation), the Bible (the testimony of the life and teachings of Jesus), and preaching (exposition and exegesis of scripture). The first of these is primary, as it is God’s own expression or interpretation of himself in human form. Without reference to one or more of these forms of communication from God we cannot properly formulate a theology that talks about God.

Jesus is a man as we all are, and he is therefore accessible and knowable to us as a man. (Barth)

From this viewpoint Barth addresses the doctrine of election. He was reacting to the classical teachings of Augustine and Calvin. Calvin spoke of double predestination, in which God chose to save some of mankind, a mankind tainted by original sin.  He also therefore chose not to save the rest of mankind. Calvin admits that this theory should appal us, but holds that it is not a cruel doctrine. God is merciful to those he chooses to save and is just to those he chooses not to save, justly punishing them for the sins of which they are guilty. This latter argument was also used by Augustine, and it will be used in adapted form by Barth.

The passage central to Barth’s doctrine of election come from Ephesians 1:4: ‘…he chose us in him [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight’. Comparing this to the doctrines of election proposed by Augustine and Calvin, Barth pointed out that they take the central role away from the person around whom the doctrine should revolve; the person of Christ.

The message of predestination, the way God expresses it to us, is through Christ, and any doctrine of election must refer to Christ or else be grounded on speculation.

Even as the object of predestination, even as elected man, Jesus Christ must still be understood as truly the beginning of all God’s ways and works. (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II,1,p120)

There is obviously a layer of ambiguity in the nature of Gods expression to us through Jesus – how can man ever fully comprehend the divine? Nevertheless, if we want to understand God this is the route that we must take.

‘Jesus Christ is the electing God; Jesus Christ is the elected man’. How are we to understand this simple statement that sums up Barth’s view of God and election? As noted above, if we wish to understand the way God is, we must understand the way God expresses himself. Both of these feed into the other, in a way similar to that proposed by Rahner (the example of a handshake – it is a gesture of respect occasioned by my respect, possible only because of my respect but without which my respect would be different). Unlike Rahner though, Barth tells us that we do not experience the way God is at all times. Instead we experience it primarily though Christ. He would have us believe that we cannot have knowledge of God until the act of God makes us it’s subject, and that the only event in which we may become the subject is the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus, through which, he will argue, we are elected.

Before the creation (c.f. Ephesians 1:4) God chose us, and he chose us through Christ. Christ is therefore the self-revealing act of God, the self-gift, through which he made his choice. Christ is ‘the electing God’. But through Christ God took on the sins of mankind. Jesus, and therefore God, suffered for these sins. God’s grace is thus revealed by the act of his taking onto himself the judgement which is deserved by man for his sins.

The rejection which all men incurred, the wrath of God under which all men lie, the death which all men must die, God in His love for me transfers from all eternity to Him in whom He loves and elects them, and whom He elects at their head and in their place. (Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 p.123)

Why and how does God do this? It is traditional to use language of God that talks about what we think of as his positive attributes. Power, mercy, knowledge. These are things that we can all at least conceive as being present in God, as they do not signify a lack but a possession. Barth says that ‘God is always God, even in his humiliation’. In the words of MacQuarrie:

Barth’s point is that humility and weakness are as fundamental to the being of God as are power and transcendence, and it is not necessary (indeed, it is absurd) to think that we have to deny one set of characteristics to make way for the other. (Jesus Christ in Modern Though, p286)

It may seem contradictory, but Barth seems to be arguing that it is in God’s nature to be both powerful and weak, high and lowly, and so on. It could therefore be part of God’s nature to forgive man eternally, to make the eternal decision to elect man through Christ, because at the same time as being perfectly just (which means that he has to make a judgement on mankind for the fall into sin that is inevitable) he is perfectly forgiving. He can show us justice and mercy at the same time. There are further issues when we consider that God is making an eternal forgiving act before the sins which he is forgiving are committed. Is this saying that no matter what sins we commit that we are forgiven? Does God know the terrible acts that will be committed by man and yet still forgive them? This seems to be a questions that cannot be ignored, for what place is there for ethics in a world in which all sins are forgiven ahead of time?

Whatever the answers to these questions, to Barth it is clear that the eternal act is carried out by choosing to become human in Jesus and take upon himself the sins that he is both judging and forgiving.

Before all created reality, before all being and becoming in time, before time itself, in the pre-temporal eternity of God, the eternal divine decision as such has as its object and content the existence of this one created being, the man Jesus of Nazareth, and the work of this man in His life and death, His humiliation and exaltation, His obedience and merit. (Barth, CD II,2 p116)

God elects man by electing Christ. He is merciful in his bestowal of grace, and just by ensuring that the judgement that is required to be made of our sins is carried out, but carried out through Christ. ‘…from all eternity God sees us in His Son as sinners to whom He is gracious’. We therefore see that God’s election of Christ transfers to us, and that we are elected through him, with the doctrine of vicarious substitution used to confirm the existence of the judgement for which man is destined by sin. As Barth puts it:

It is in being gracious in this way that God sets forth His own glory. In is in the election of the man Jesus that his decision to be gracious is made. (Barth, CD II, 1, p 121)

In regard to sin, Barth points out that ‘Satan…is the shadow which accompanies the light of the election of Jesus Christ’ (CD II,1,p122). We are not able to resist the power that evil has in the world. Unlike Jesus, who withstood the temptations in Matthew 4, men will never be able to resist, hence taking upon himself the ‘rejection that rests upon his temptation and corruption’. Only God is able to reject Satan, but through the incarnation Jesus is also able to make this rejection. Jesus is for all men, so God has, in place of man, elected one who has rejected evil. ‘He, the Elect, is appointed to check and defeat Satan on behalf of all those that are elected “in Him”, on behalf of the descendants and confederates of Adam now beloved of God’ (CD II,1,p123).

There is ambiguity in the language that Barth uses. How is Jesus both elected and elector? This is part of the problem of talking of a doctrine of election through incarnation in a triune God. However, if we want to be able to talk about it at all, which surely is important, we must accept these difficulties and ambiguities or risk remaining silent.

Is this doctrine of election a universal doctrine? By putting the quotation from Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians into its context it would appear that it shouldn’t be. For instance, Ephesians 1:12 says that the ‘we’ or ‘us’ being discussed in the passage refers to those ‘who were the first to hope in Christ’, suggesting that it is a doctrine of election that gives election to all Christians rather than all humans.

Barth, however, says that:

‘There is, then, no background, no decretum absolutum, no mystery of the divine good-pleasure, in which predestination might just as well be man’s rejection. When we look into the innermost recesses of the divine good-pleasure, predestination is the non-rejection of man.’ (CD)

This is strongly suggestive of a universal predestination for salvation. He goes further:

‘…in God’s decree at the beginning there is for man only a predestination which corresponds to the perfect being of God Himself: a predestination to His Kingdom and to blessedness and life. Any other predestination is merely presumed and unreal … not the divine predestination fulfilled in God’s eternal decree.’ (CD)

It would appear then that Barth holds the following position: God, in his eternal decision, created man that he might be gracious to them, and showed his mercy by electing us all through Christ. This gets us away from the mysterious decretum absolutum, which is a major problem for traditional doctrines of election. Why does God decide to save some and not others? Barth avoids the idea that God is in some way arbitrary. He avoids making this absolute decree somehow more important than Jesus, whose incarnation he takes to be the definitive act of God.

To summarise, Jesus is both elector and elected. He elects all of humanity by his existence, and we are elected as he is elected. God freely chooses to give us his grace, but we are not able to say whether or not this grace is given universally; it is a question that we should not answer yes or no to. We should instead hope.

Theology Essay 2 – Karl Rahner

The second essay in my theology “portfolio” is on Karl Rahner. Again, typos left intact. No comments from the lecturer this time…

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Karl Rahner’s Anthropology

Central to the theology of Karl Rahner is the notion that we experience God, through his “self-gift”, at all times and in all experiences. It is only through awareness of God that we are able to have these experiences at all.

Rahner starts by asking us what it is that makes us human. His answer is that it is the mystery, the infinite, the unlimited, of which we are always aware, consciously or unconsciously. When we are conscious of an object, a finite thing, we are only able to be aware of it as a distinct thing by an awareness of the infinite. ‘Rahner describes the mind as reaching out beyond any given object’ (Kilby 5). By being aware of a limit (the finiteness of the object), we are aware of something beyond that limit, the infinite. This infinite being is God.

Rahner talks more specifically about this awareness in terms of knowledge. We gain knowledge in a ‘basic intellectual act’ that leads to simple knowledge statements such as “This is a chair”. But such a basic act is only possible because of a tentative awareness of something more perfect, an ideal; God. Awareness of God is caused by, and itself causes, awareness of the finite, and as such is identical with what it is to be human.

The “awareness” above should not be taken to mean actual conscious awareness of God. This is not something we will experience until, presumably, the beatific vision. In our experiences we are aware of God only as a background awareness, a Vorgriff. God is the horizon to which we strive, but we never become truly aware of what is always just over the horizon. Awareness is a movement towards the horizon rather than arriving at the unseen. It is not knowledge of a particular object, or love in a particular form. It is the act of knowing, the act of loving.

Another metaphor that we could use here is of climbing a mountain. We are all familiar with the basic act of taking a single step up the mountain. It is an “every day” occurrence, not something that we can deny. The ultimate aim of this act is to get to the peak of the mountain. But what if the mountain is infinitely high? We will keep on taking the next step, but never reach the ultimate, the peak. We may or may not realise that this infinite peak exists, we may just be climbing because it is the natural thing to do, but nevertheless there is something towards which we are striving. We can just never reach it. Our vorgriff is the vague notion we have of the peak, despite not being close to knowing what the infinite peak would be like.

…the essence of knowledge lies in the mystery which is the object of primary experience and is alone self-evident. (Rahner, The Practise of Faith, 65)

These acts of knowing, of experiencing the infinite, are things that we all do at virtually every moment of our lives. Rahner claims that it is through appreciation of the connection between experience and God that we will gain knowledge of God. This is because these experiences are more than just things that happen to us; they are us. The relationship that I have with God is the fact of my existence.

Transcendence grasped in its unlimited breadth is the a priori condition of objective and reflective knowledge and evaluation. It is the very condition of its possibility, even though it is ordered to the inexpressible. (Rahner, The Practise of Faith, 66)

Donceel, in God and the Dynamism of the Mind, explains this by reference to our notion of is. By acknowledging, or realising, the existence of an object or concept, I ‘affirm that it is’. However, in individual instances of objects we are not dealing with something that merely is, just an instance of a particular thing. Our mind seeks to go beyond the objectification that we apply to life, to look for the “thing” that simply is, the “object” to which we can apply the word is without reservation and without requiring physical instantiation. Rahner, according to Donceel, tells us that this reality that we are looking for is God. God simply is.

Humans therefore experience God at all times and in all things. However it may not seem that way to many people. How may we become more aware of this experience? Rahner suggests that we must face situations that highlight our humanness; boredom, fear, imminent death, forgiveness with no reward, loneliness. The theme that runs through these is highlighted by the last, loneliness. They all heighten our awareness of what it is to be human, a small, seemingly insignificant being who will be alive for only a short amount of time. By contemplating this, by facing the truths that these situations bring to the fore, we experience the idea of there being more to us than this, and we touch on the awareness of the infinite that Rahner wants us to see. ‘The depth of the human  abyss,  which  in  a  thousand  ways  is  the  theme  of philosophy,  is  already  the  abyss  which  has  been  opened  by God’s  grace  and  which  stretches  into  the  depths  of  God himself’ (Rahner, Theological Investigations).

This theology does not have the effect of taking the central theme of religious life away from God and on to man. Instead it merges the two. By concentrating on an anthropocentric theology, we are at the same time studying the only things that we have access to that can tell us anything at all about God. We move towards God by contemplating what it is in us that is transcendent.

An important aspect of this is admitting that when we talk of God we are not able to say anything that is properly true. Talk of God is talk of the unlimited, something that we only have a pre-apprehension of. Our language deals with objects, with the finite, and talk of God relegates him to these categories. We can approximate using analogy and metaphor, but we cannot talk directly about God without admitting that we are on unsure ground.

Where does Rahner’s theology leave traditional aspects of Christianity? With the emphasis placed on God being experienced at all times and in all things, surely it moves away from being able to talk about Christ in a special sense, or about traditional religious observance?

Dealing with the first of these ideas first, Rahner says that religious acts are both a result of, and a sign of, God’s grace. An analogy is with a handshake. It is a gesture of respect to another, but it is only brought about by the respect that I already have. I do not shake hands to gain the respect. Similarly with, say, baptism. I do not get baptised to gain grace, it is a result of the grace I have and an expression of it.

God’s grace is in his self-gift, or self-communication, to us. This notion is central to Rahner’s discussion on Jesus. The incarnation of Christ is the peak of God’s graciousness towards humanity. The self-gift of God is experienced by humans as the quest for truth and love, the awareness of mystery. Christ fulfilled these “capacities” for truth and love and as such in him ‘God’s invitation and man’s loving response fully coincide’ (Donceel, 258). Christ therefore is himself God, he is the ultimate gift from God, a human that is able to be simultaneously divine, and to show us what it means to be so.

The history of revelation, then, consists in the growing awareness that we are involved with the permanent mystery and that our involvement becomes even more intense and exclusive. (Rahner, The Practise of Faith, 67)

The self-communication of God is ‘promised, offered, and guaranteed to us through him’ (Rahner, Experiences of a Catholic Theologian, 301). However, there is a danger, in Rahner’s view, that by concentrating on the incarnation as a source for knowledge of God we replace ‘God with self’. We mustn’t think that our awareness or knowledge of God is fixed through the incarnation and revelation, as this leads us into the trap of assigning the word “mystery” to something we could in fact know. We must of course be willing to listen to the message of God’s self-revelation that incarnation and revelation can bring us, but it is important to remember that God’s self-revelation is a constant event in our lives.

What are we to make of people who reject the notion of God? If God is present in our existence, what does it mean to make this rejection? There are of course people who reject the notion of God and act in a way that goes against the very core of “religious” sentiments. But Rahner tells us that there is a second kind of atheists

Who, in fact, pay allegiance to the true God. They affirm God’s existence transcendentally, as all human beings do; they deny it categorically, in their thinking, but they profess and admit it through their moral activity, by being “men of good will”. (Donceel, God and the Dynamism of the Mind: Karl Rahner, 258)

The difference between these people and atheists of the first kind is the life that they live. By being “men of good will”, they show that God is not absent from their lives. The rejection that they have is an intellectual one. The God that is rejected is God as they understand him. As we know society has many models of God – they can’t all be right, and it is often right to reject them. But atheism can be seen as

…a journey on which a man grows weary in the pursuit of knowledge, leaves what is still unknown to itself and gives the name of mystery to this unmastered realm of the intelligible. (Rahner, The Practise of Faith, 66)

The knowledge of the atheist isn’t true knowledge, which Rahner characterises as ‘the presence of the mystery itself’. It is “giving up” on the true object and source of knowledge – the infinite. It is to acknowledge only the existence of the finite, and this means that we ignore God.

In the words of Joseph Donceel, summarising Rahner:

Man will be totally himself only by becoming more than himself, which he does by letting God, who is his maker, become as it were his very life with sanctifying grace. (God and the Dynamism of the Mind: Karl Rahner, 258)

This is the central message of Rahner’s theology. We must allow ourselves to receive the grace of God, and make a loving response. We can do this by listening to the incarnation, or revelation, but most importantly by recognising God in all that we do and learn. God is how we comprehend the finiteness and contingency of our reality.

Theology Essay 1 – George Eliot

The marks for my first set of theology essays have finally appeared, so now I can put the essays up here without running the risk of being accused of plagiarising my own work…

I had to write a “portfolio” of essays over the course of four weeks, each of ~2,000 words. The subject for each essay was given by the subject of the weeks lecture. We start with George Eliot, who was the focus of the first theology lecture “The Makings of Modern Atheism”. More essays on slightly more “Christian” thinkers to follow!

Typos left intact. Comment from lecturer – how would I answer Nietzsche criticism of Eliot? Nietzsche said:

They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.

We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth–it stands and falls with faith in God.

When the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.

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George Eliot and Feuerbach on God and the Good

Although initially a devote Christian, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Anne Evans) came to espouse a form of humanism that would be recognisable today. Eliot was well educated as a child, and through her education, and subsequent move to Coventry, she came to read and think about such thinkers as Lytton, Strauss, Spencer and Emerson. This led her to break from traditional religious views, although not initially from a belief in a deistic or pantheistic God. It was, in particular, the work of Charles Hennell, author of An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, that led Eliot away from belief in the bible as literal truth. By viewing Christian doctrine as mythic rather than factual, she opened the door to seeing religion as a whole as something manmade.

In 1854 Eliot translated Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and much of her future thinking is reminiscent of themes from this work. Feuerbach proposed that religion is ‘the relation of man to himself’; that is, religion is man’s projection of himself on to the “divine”. The attributes given to God are therefore nothing other than the attributes man finds or desires in himself. “The yearning of man after something above himself is nothing else than the longing after the perfect type of his nature” (Feuerbach, 281). The study of religion becomes anthropology, the study of man.

Eliot wrote that “With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree”, marking a movement onwards from her initial rejection of Christianity a decade earlier. What she had been missing was a philosophy that could reconcile her notions of morality with the absence of a God. It was the idea of Feuerbach, that religion is a projection of what is human, that allowed Eliot to bridge this gap.

According to Eliot and other thinkers at the time, the world is alone in an unordered, uncaring universe. Man, by virtue of his consciousness, is able to go beyond this thoughtless system, which many would think would be chaotic in the absence of a divine being. Through the evolution of humans as a species, a moral order arose – this can be hypothesised as arising due to the survival value of altruism, sympathy and group cohesion.

Morality thus formed has a subjective and objective basis. The subjective basis is the importance my feelings, my desires, have to me. The objective basis is, to quote Bernard J. Paris, ‘other men; and we become aware of it only when we regard our fellows objectively, that is, as subjects in themselves to whom we are objects. If I am important to myself, and other men have an inner life like my own, then they must be important to themselves.’ This has echoes of Feuerbach: ‘Feeling is therefore feeling with respect to an object taken as a thou, that is, as a person.’ (Feuerbach, 281)

It is in treating our fellow humans as moral agents that we come to have a shared morality. We then stop thinking of ourselves as a group of individuals and realise that we are a species, humans, sharing in our hopes and fears. Living a moral life therefore involves more than looking out for our own interests; we have to life for the good of humankind. ‘As healthy, sane human beings we must love and hate – love what is good for mankind, hate what is evil for mankind’ (Eliot, Letters V 29-31). This is a theme evident in the literary works of Eliot, in which characters are often portrayed as living lives of self-sacrifice that nevertheless contribute to the good of those around them.

Some would see human morality as unimportant if it did not come from a divine source, and was “merely” the product of human evolution. Eliot held that this is ‘equivalent to saying that you care no longer for colour, now you know the laws of the spectrum’ (Letters VI 98). Morality is a self-evident truth, one that we all experience, and a natural description of it should not render it meaningless in our everyday lives and actions.

It may further be asked why anyone should act in a moral way if there is no meaning to live other than that which we create. After all, we will all eventually die, surely making our actions here on Earth meaningless and empty. Eliot refutes this simply – other people are individual moral agents, “objective sources of value”, and some will continue to live after I die. We are part of a continuum of human existence, the existence of a species of individuals, and the effects of our actions will be felt even after we are gone.

What place for religion in this worldview? Surely it (or at least some of the more popular aspects of Christianity) exemplifies the moral position of “love thy neighbour” which Eliot puts forward? It was, and still is, common to hold that morality is a product of religion, that without some form of divine guidance man would be a base creature succumbing to his every whim. Eliot, as outlined above, believed that morality was innate in humans; the moral duty is ‘peremptory and absolute’. Eliot sought a way beyond traditional religious morality.

Religion, according to Eliot’s later thinking, arrives at morality not through divine providence, but through the acquisition and shaping of pre-existing human moral systems. By viewing religion as projecting human attributes (or at least ideals of these attributes) on to God, we cease to see it as a source of morality but instead see it as an expression of morality. But according to Eliot it is a limited expression. By centring attention on God it distracts people from focusing on what really matters, and what they are ultimately talking about when they talk of god; mankind.

‘Heaven help us! Said the old religions – the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another’ (Eliot, Letters II 82)

Established doctrine and dogma doesn’t help the individual to see their place in the moral system to which they belong. By following authority we undermine the very morality that helped to build up the religious image of morality that the devote sees in front of them. Feuerbach sees Christian doctrines as a projection of human needs and fears, and we need to try to free ourselves of these fears. This is almost Epicurean in scope – to get over our fears we need to free ourselves from religion.

Despite these potentially damning indictments of religion, it could be argued that Eliot was arguing for some form of “religion of humanity”. What do we mean by this? Eliot was certainly influenced by the positivists, and in this vein we could take “religion of humanity” to mean something along the lines of that proposed by Comte. In this model, we need morality, doctrine and worship in order for this “religion” to function properly. Whilst initially emphasising doctrine, Comte eventually focused his “religion” on worship, to the extent that it was referred to as ‘Catholicism without Christ’. Without this emphasis, Eliot cannot be accused of following Comte down this track; she was not advocating the founding of churches to positivism.

What was Eliot proposing? She was certainly working in the positivist tradition – knowledge is limited by our experience, not given to us by divine revelation. With her emphasis on morality over doctrine and worship, Eliot’s religion of humanity was much more a philosophy than a religion, a way of looking at the world and at others rather than a set of dogmas to be followed and explored. It is therefore misleading to label it religion. It is Humanism.

All this is not to say that Eliot wanted the world to be rid of religions:

It would be wise in our theological teachers … [to enable the Christian system]…to strike a firm root in man’s moral nature, and to entwine itself with the growth of those new forms of social life to which we are tending (Eliot, Selected Critical Writings, 32)

The good works performed by Christians, the evident morality of the teachings of Jesus; Eliot saw these as religion at its best. If the power that religion harnessed could be used to further these messages rather than furthering temporal power and needs, then religion could be one of, if not the, best method of getting across to “the masses” the message that Eliot wanted to spread. It would require breaking free of

Terms and conceptions which having their root in conditions of thought no longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality and are for us as spells which have lost their virtue (Eliot Selected Critical Writings, 19)

Religion therefore has to be changed rather than kept in its current form. It is useful as a way for people to come to a sense of morality, but the emphasis needs to shift away from a relationship between a person and God. This self-centred relation is really, in Feuerbach’s model, a relationship between the self and a projection of the self. By stepping back from this model it is, according to Eliot’s philosophy, possible to realise that the relationship that we should be in is with our fellow humans.

“My soul is so knit with yours that it is but a divided life that I live without you. And this moment, now you are with me, and I feel that our hearts are filled with the same love, I have a fullness of strength to bear and do our heavenly Father’s will, that I had lost before”.

So says Dinah in Adam Bede. Despite the heavy use of religious language, this passage emphasises that it is with human connections and relationships that we gain meaning and morality for our lives. Despite this, Eliot is sympathetic towards religion. It is after all a powerful force, and Eliot sees it as a force for good in the world around her, helping many people towards acts of good.

‘The idea of God is really moral in its influence – it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man – only when God is contemplated as sympathizing with the pure elements of human feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attributes which we recognize to be moral in humanity…. The idea of a God…is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity by the contemplation of Jesus as “God manifest in the flesh”.’ (Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming)

This passage encapsulates the central ideas that Eliot wanted to get across. Morality is important as applied to humanity, and it is a product of humanity. Religion, correctly thought of, acts as a great vehicle for this morality, but it only does so if we realise that the object of our devotion is another moral being, another self, and not a mythical God.

Hume Misunderstood

Over the last few months, and via a few different sources, I’ve come to realise that a couple of philosophical positions that I’d thought were put forward by Hume weren’t. It’s a wonderful case of learning that there’s a lot that you don’t know. I thought I’d share the simplistic statements that I thought Hume put forward and then explain why it isn’t as simple as commonly assumed (at least I assume that other people assume these simple positions – they’re positions that are certainly echoed in discussions I’ve seen…).

The first problem is with the is-ought divide. It’s commonly assumed that Hume showed that is does not equal ought; that is, that just because some state of affairs exists does not mean that that state of affairs matches what ought to exist. What does Hume actually say? From A Treatise of Human Nature:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

This does not say that is doesn’t imply ought. What it says is actually much more realistic and modest – if we want to go from an “is” to an “ought” then we have to say why this move is valid. Hume is just pointing out that he has not seen a system of morality that has done this. Indeed, it is a very easy shift to make without realising that justification is necessary. Why should you conform to my way of doing things? Because that’s how these things are done! Why should I give you any more reason? That’s (a very simplistic version of) the natural law of catholicism, probably the ultimate conflator of is and ought.

So, can is imply ought? I suspect that it can, but Hume teaches me that if I want to claim this then I have to be explicit in laying out exactly why I can make the connection.

The second problem is concerned with Hume on miracles. I’d always assumed that Hume argued that miracles don’t happen. Obviously I was mistaken. From Of Miracles in Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding:

The plain consequence is “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsity would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior”

This is the central claim of the piece, that it would take some extraordinary testimony or evidence to “establish a miracle”, evidence that shifts the balance or probability in favour of acceptance of the occurrence of a miracle (in line, one supposes, with the evidentialism principle).

Meanwhile in the rest of On Miracles, Hume has argued that no testimony can shift probabilities enough to accept the occurrence of a miracle. Miracle stories conflict with each other, they do no appear in settings where suitable people can witness and evaluate them in a “scientific” setting, they always seem to support some pre-existing ruth claims, and importantly we know that the human mind is weak and prone to self-deception and belief in “unbelievable” claims. Hume argues that these considerations should make us realise that we are never in a position to rationally believe in miracles.

It is therefore an epistemic arguments. Hume does not say that miracles are impossible (through being incoherent) or that they don’t happen. It’s just that if they do happen we are never in a position to have knowledge of their occurrence. It just isn’t rational.

Both the problems in my prior understanding are great counterexamples to claims to intellectual arrogance or epistemic certainty that are often made about the enlightenment philosophers and todays new atheists. Is there a more modest position than saying that you should explain subtle shifts from is to ought? Is there a more modest position than saying that we should withhold belief in epistemically weak statements? I don’t think so, and Hume thus shows that it isn’t rational thinking people who need to develop a sense of modesty.

The Evidentialist Principle

Time to continue my look at evidentialism. So far, I’ve tried to show that we are at least coherent in thinking that there is such a thing as an ethics of belief and how we could define “belief”. The central theme of this post will be to suggest evidentialism as the correct ethics of belief, hopefully with some justification. The next post (probably after a holiday-induced delay) will try to defend evidentialism from possible attack.

In a 2008 paper Allen Wood provides what I think is probably the best formulation of evidentialism that I have seen:

Apportion the strength of your belief to the evidence; believe only what is justified by the evidence, and believe it to the full extent, but only to the extent, that it is justified by the evidence. (Wood: 9)

This is less extreme than the call by Clifford for anyone, at anytime, and anywhere, to only belief anything on sufficient evidence. The principle above gives room for partial belief in the face of only weak evidence, which is important. One thing that is important to note is that this definition doesn’t restrict evidentialism to a narrow, empirical form of “evidence”. It allows whatever form of justification we decide is epistemically acceptable. I take evidence here to mean empirical evidence, logical arguments and suitable testimony (more on this in the next post).

Now, I’m going to take it as given that what we care about in whatever process it is that we use to form beliefs is that the process leads us to believe things that are true, or at least more likely true than not (in which case we may only hold a partial belief, but anyway…). This makes sense from our definition of belief – if I am going to assert something as true (which I will if I believe it), this doesn’t make sense unless I actually think it is in fact true.

This leads us to the first point in favour of evidentialism: it is natural. Consider an exchange in which someone else tells me that they believe P. Put in the form of our working definition, they assert that P is true. In any natural situation we are going to believe that they do in fact hold P to be true, and moreover that they have reasons for thinking this is the case. We work on an assumption that other people aren’t bullshitting, that their beliefs are aimed at truth, and we naturally consider evidence as the path to this truth. Without this, we wouldn’t be able to exchange much of the information that passes between us everyday. When I ask a stranger for directions, I don’t assume they’re making them up, I assume they have sufficient reasons to give me the specific directions that they give.

A second point is found by considering the role of evidence. It is fairly uncontentious to say that a belief supported by evidence is more likely to be true than a belief unsupported by evidence. Having evidence allows us to increase the probability of a belief being true. Given the desire to hold true beliefs over false beliefs, this speaks in favour of evidentialism. A rival theory would have to be able to play some substitute role in increasing the probability, and I don’t yet know what else other than evidence could do this.

What other reasons could we have for thinking that evidentialism might be true? Wood breaks down reasons into “self-regarding” and “other-regarding”.

Self-regarding grounds for evidentialism are premised on

the idea that each of us has good reason to regard ourselves as having a certain value, a value entitling us to self-respect. (Wood: 18)

Thus our self-respect, or dignity, makes ethical demands on how we think and act. Part of this is that we shouldn’t let other people do our thinking for us when we are capable of doing the thinking ourselves. So, whilst I might have to accept testimony from someone about the obscure workings of some part of algebraic topology say, I shouldn’t accept on faith testimony that I am more than capable of thinking through myself. If I’m presented with a belief and asked to accept it on faith, I should ask myself what evidence there is for it. Only when the testimony comes from a source known to reliably cause true belief should I lower this standard, because that in itself counts as evidence.

Another self-regarding ground is wishful thinking. We shouldn’t believe something in the absence of evidence (or in the face of evidence) just because we wish it were true. As Wood points out:

We naturally wish we knew many things we can’t know – such as what (if anything) becomes of us after we die, or whether there is a benevolent power secretly watching over us, or perhaps the ultimate fate, after we are gone, of some great historical cause to which we have devoted ourselves. It is depressing and frightening to realize that you can never know these things; it is pleasant and consoling to have a belief about them… (Wood: 18)

But if you think that beliefs formed on the basis of insufficient evidence can make such beliefs reasonable, he further points out that :

You should be ashamed to deal with your human predicament in this cowardly way. (Wood: 19)

To form beliefs based on wishful thinking is to lose our dignity as freethinking individuals.

Other-regarding grounds are those that involve others. Firstly, what we believe can and does affect others. If any effects are caused by beliefs with insufficient evidence, surely we should be morally culpable for these beliefs in a way that is not seen if beliefs are formed according to the principle of evidentialism? Further, by even putting ourselves into a situation where others may be affected by our beliefs, or even just asked to agree (or disagree) with our beliefs, we do not respect their dignity as rational, self-respecting moral agents if we do not confront them with our most honest appraisal of the evidence, if we ask instead that they accept our beliefs on faith.

…we owe it to others, simply as fellow human beings and partners in the collective rational search for truth, to offer them, in the give and take of communication, what is best in oursleves and our unique perspective. (Wood: 21)

In short, we owe them beliefs based on evidence, that have reasons lending them weight, that may in fact be true.

So there we have it: my attempt at a (short) case for evidentialism. Of course, some will naturally think that whilst the principle of evidentialism espoused above may be true some or most of the time, there are occasions when faith is necessary or desirable. What would it take to convince me that this is the case?

1. You would have to be able to tell me what beliefs it is that are exempt from the moral demand for evidence.
2. You would have to be able to show that we can in fact know these beliefs to be true (or likely true) despite there being no evidence.
3. Finally, you would need to show how this belief fits into a moral framework that allows for self- and other-regarding grounds for morality.

I think that’s a pretty tall order. No defence of an epistemology based on faith that I’ve seen has come close to being able to justify itself. I think I’ll stick to evidentialism.

———————–

Wood, A (2008), The duty to believe according to the evidence, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 63, 7-24.

The existence of God: the argument from desire

In a comment to my last post I encountered an argument for the existence of God that I hadn’t seen before. Without any further preamble, here is the argument as presented in a link supplied by the commenter:

1. Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
2. But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
3. Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
4. This something is what people call “God” and “life with God forever.”

This is the “argument from desire”. It is, in my opinion, philosophically weak.

Consider the first premise, that every natural desire has some “real object” that can satisfy it. If by “object” the argument refers to an actual thing, then this is trivially false. Consider tiredness, a natural, innate desire for sleep. There is no object “sleep” that comes along and satisfies this desire. Instead we find ourselves in a state in which the desire is satisfied. This kind of natural desire is therefore distinct from “natural desire that have objects that satisfy them” (think of hunger – this has an object that satisfies it, namely food), but the argument cannot make this distinction without begging the question.

So straight from the get-go a refinement is necessary to the argument, in that we have to specify instead that:

1a. Every natural, innate desire in us can be satisfied.

Even this requires justification. Is it really true that every natural desire can be satisfied? Who is to say that by pointing out the supposed natural desire in premise 2 we haven’t identified a natural desire that can’t be satisfied. We would have to be able to show that it would be impossible for there to be a natural desire that isn’t capable of being satisfied. I’m not sure how this could be done.

Premise 2  is basically referring to a desire for “something more”. It assumes that this desire is universale (innate) and also that it cannot be satisfied by a “real” object, a thing. But what if it was capable of being satisfied by finding ourselves in an appropriate state? I’m pretty sure the state that I find myself in every time I go sailing qualifies. Of course religious people would argue that I’m not really satisfied then, but then that would be to beg the question by saying that there exists this thing called God before we even get past the premises. I will skip questions of the universality of this desire – how you’d establish it I don’t know. It is enough to note that premises 1a and 2 cannot be used to prove the existence on a thing

Now, the conclusion at 3. If the desire in question was satisfied by finding ourselves in an appropriate state then there would be no need to reference God at all in the argument – I therefore take it to be the case that God must (in the argument at least…) correspond in some way to an object that can satisfy our desires. He is the bread that satisfies our hunger. So, how do we know that, in cases of natural desire that are satisfied by an object that the object in question exists? We go out and find it. I know hunger can be satisfied because I can hold bread in my hands, I know thirst can be satisfied because I just saw water falling from the sky. No such process is undergone at any point of this argument, and without firmly establishing premise 1a (or 1 I guess), no similar conclusion can be drawn.

Conclusion 4 is barely worth mentioning, with it’s echoes of Aquinas. Fine, people call this abstract thing “God”. But it’s not God. It’s the “thing” that satisfies our desire for “more”. You can call it God (of the Abrahamic variety) but that doesn’t make it so. I’m sure it’s argued that this argument is intended to make belief in the Christian God more reasonable, not to establish his existent, but then why include what is so obviously a bad last step?

There are a few more arguments that could be made that try to establish that the argument begs the question, but I don’t think they’re necessarily as solid as the points I’ve made above, so I think this is as good a place as any to stop. Conclusion: the argument is flawed.

Reflections on Theology

So I’m a year into the masters. My last course was “Contemporary Christian Thought”, or in other words, Christian theology. I’m doing the course with the express aim of balancing my philosophy with some religion – I want to at least try to understand where the other side in the religion debate is coming from. So, I’ve been thinking about what I took away from the theology course.

For one big reason I owe a big debt of gratitude to the course. Without it, I would probably never have picked up anything written by George Eliot. That’s a situation no one should have to face. She was an amazing writer, a recovered evangelical who espoused a very forward-thinking humanism. Her novels are exceptional and her critical essays even better. She could write incredible takedowns of her contemporaries – read Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, or Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming. You will struggle to find more effective critical writing. So, thank you theology course.

But of course, Eliot was only introduced as a way of looking at the “origins” of modern atheism, as if the arguments put forward by such atheism are new. It’s similar to the way that Alister McGrath tries to pin the atheism of Dawkins on Feuerbach and Marx, without realising that these people (and more) only helped sow the seeds that allowed people like Eliot and Dawkins to live in a world where atheism could reasonably be seen as a reasonable social choice. The arguments that atheists use are older than the “origins” of modern atheism – they date from the Enlightenment back to Plato, and every time in between.

So, having given us Eliot as a counterpoint, the rest of the course focused on Christian thinkers. Rahner, Barth, Moltmann, Taylor, Girard, Crossan. Through these theologians we explored ideas such as the anthropology of religion, the doctrine of election, the suffering of God, Christian and Jewish relations, the nature of Jesus, and other topics. These subjects, and these theologians, are the topics that religious folk seem to say that atheists should be addressing – rather than ignore modern, “sophisticated” theology, we should read these people, contemplate them, think about what they say and realise that actually religion does have something to offer.

I like to think I have now done at least the first part of this. I have given my waking moments (away from work) to reading and thinking about modern Christian thought. So hopefully my opinion isn’t too ill-informed anymore. For what it’s worth here’s what I think about theology. It doesn’t work.

Before I’m accused of not being “nuanced”, here’s what I mean when I say that. Theologians have a lot of things to say about God, about Jesus and about life. There’s one problem with how they say these things though, which is that they have the implicit (ok, I guess a lot of the time it’s explicit) assumption that this thing they call “God” exists.That’s fine, if we treat theology as just a complicated word game, playing with a particular set of beliefs. But this exposes two problems.

First, theologians and the religious in general don’t treat it as just a word game. Rather, it is treated as if it can reach conclusions with actual substantive value. This assumes it has some epistemological basis that makes what it says have some form of truth, a truth that might be applicable to other people. But what is this basis? What can it be other than faith? If I have the correct faith I may believe that the conclusions reached by a theologian apply to me, but if I don’t have it, why should I have any reason at all to think that?

This brings me to the second problem. I said above that theology is a word game, setting out what we can say given a set of beliefs. But of the theologians I studied, I’m not sure I encountered two with the same beliefs. Fine, they all believed in “God”, whatever that may be. But, they had other ancillary beliefs that affected what they could say. They didn’t all believe the same thing. How then can we think that they were talking about the same “Christian” set of beliefs? I don’t think we can. More importantly, how can we decide which theologian is right? With each position maintained through faith (be it via a reliance on scripture or just plain old faith statements), there is no mechanism for deciding that this theologian should be considered correct whilst that one shouldn’t. It’s a word game with no winner.

So that’s what I mean when I say theology doesn’t work. It can’t give us knowledge that has any meaning beyond religious semantics. I tried, I listened, but that’s what I learned in 10 weeks of study.

What is Belief?

In my last post, I tried to show that it is not unreasonable to suppose that there may be such a thing as an ethics of belief. Let’s suppose that this has been established, and that we’re not barking up the wrong tree. An important next step is to ask a simple question: what exactly is a belief?

What do we mean when we say that we believe something? For the purposes of this discussion I want to step away from the simple use of the word in which the phrase “i believe that…” has the same meaning as “i think it may be the case that…”. In this phrasing belief is a matter of inclination: I am inclined to think that it is the case that P (where P is some statement that may or may not be true, such as “It is raining” or “The window is open”). But do you really believe P? This meaning just doesn’t capture what it means (or what I think it means) to believe something.

In Beliefs own Ethics, Jonathan Adler presents a way of talking about belief that adds something substantial to the potential definition above. He asks us to look at belief from a first person perspective. What does it mean for meto believe something? If I say “I believe that P”, surely it is natural to suppose that I would also be willing to say “It is true that P is the case”, which is just the same as simply asserting “P” (i.e. asserting the statement that P represents). So, I believe something if I would assert it as true.

There’s an important point to note here, which is that not all our beliefs are conscious beliefs. I didn’t have a (conscious) belief about the number of pens in my pen holder until I just counted them, but it is safe to say that I believed it to be less than 100 (it’s a small pen holder). It is only when I attend to this belief, that is, pay attention to it and think about it, that I am in a position to assert it.

So, Adler says that we can safely say that someone believes P if, when they attended to their beliefs they would assert P as true. This fits much better with my intuitive definition than then tentative definition above. It’s important to note that this definition does not imply knowledge of P. I hold a belief because I think I have sufficient reasons to hold that it is true, and I would therefore hope that I know P, but this in no way implies that I know P. To know something I have to believe it, and it also has to be true (and justified, plus some other criteria to overcome the Gettier problem, or something else altogether that isn’t justification… but that’s a subject for another post). The aim of belief (presumably, but just typing this I’m wondering if this is the case) is to arrive at true belief, but that doesn’t mean my beliefs are true…

…which reminds me of a cool Plato dialogue, the Meno, in which Socrates is arguing about the value of knowledge. Does knowledge of the route from one city to another have any value over partial belief that the same route will get you there? Both work, and if the value of knowledge is that it is true, partial belief has the same to offer. Socrates suggests that it is the strength of knowledge that counts – if the person holding only partial belief in the route was to follow it and it suddenly veered away from the direction the city was in, they would doubt the route. The person with knowledge would not. So is it the more rigid, fixed nature of knowledge that is of value? But, that’s a digression away from belief. Next post, hopefully sooner this time, I’ll try to look at some arguments for evidentialism.