Going Against the Norm

Normblog asks:

Since God seems to be conceivable as a foundation for morality without further ado, why can’t certain moral principles (respect for life, justice, the right to liberty) be conceived as normatively fundamental without further ado?

Let me start with the simplest of the observations I have to make about this: Normblog itself has God-like powers in that something can be made normative merely by virtue of Mr. Geras’ propounding it. That leaves things a little unfair. But one must soldier on regardless.

A couple more observations, then. First, I wouldn’t say that God is conceivable as a foundation for morality – I would say that God’s being a foundation of morality is part of the very definition of who or what God is. It’s the very raison d’être of God, or at least a key part of it. According to the Abramic tradition, God is eternal, God is omnipotent, God is good (there’s the morality, built right in) – and it’s God’s commandments that all people must obey. The distinction is in the timing: it’s not that the idea, notion or concept of God was already there, and then at some point someone conceived it also as a foundation for morality: its being a foundation for morality was part of its very beginning.

Here’s a less subtle point: this conceiving of God as a foundation for morality did not happen ‘without further ado’. If Freud’s ideas about how God (meaning here of course the concept of God) came into being are correct, well, that was a process of thousands of years at least, perhaps more. If, on the other hand, God never came into being at all because He’s always existed, well then, in that case He really exists and ‘conceiving of Him as a basis for morality without further ado’ hardly captures the process by which He revealed Himself and his moral will and law to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and apparently also Jesus and Mohammed and lots of others on the way along in there.

But most importantly, the concept, idea, notion, or, if such be the case, reality of God is a very different thing from a moral principle. God, if He exists as commonly understood, is an agent (and, according to ancient reports, an extremely powerful one). God, according to the tradition that has Him as a basis for morality in the first place, has created the world and He has created us, and He has done so that we might obey and please Him, and should we fail to do so He may punish us. God wills, God commands, God even threatens. In the God scenario, it’s not that we took the concept of God and conceived it as a foundation for morality; that was never our choice to make. We can take or leave principles – we can make them a basis for morality, or sneeze at them. But we don’t decide or choose whether or not God exists, and if He does then it’s He who decides the basis for morality and not we.

The idea of God as a basis for morality is the idea that an eternal and omnipotent agent has willed and commanded us to live a certain way. I’m not sure there’s anything obvious that this has in common with the idea of principles as a basis for morality, in which we choose certain abstract principles that we decide we’re going to live by.

I surmise that Norm came at his post from the point of view of an atheist writing for atheists, assuming a shared understanding that obviously this God business is just another human construct. It might well be that, too. But if you take God as the basis for your morality then you don’t share that understanding — you actually believe He exists. Which makes your basis for morality a rather different kind of thing than a principle or a collection of principles. And if you don’t believe that God exists, then you’re not going to be arguing that He might be a basis for morality.

Offence Taken? Not Granted.

There is a substantial post up on Normblog by the philosopher Eve Garrard. As with everything she writes, it is well worth a read.

I must say I find it worrying that such a post is even necessary. It really ought to be clear to every democratically-minded person these days why free speech needs to be protected, and that it’s got nothing to do with the accuracy or inaccuracy of religious beliefs or any others. (It further ought to be clear, although I am painfully aware that it isn’t, that, as Eve with customary eloquence demonstrates, the factual mistakenness of religious belief doesn’t render religion in and of itself, in sum, a force for evil in the world.)

But the observation I want to make here is a different one. Eve mentions the importance of getting across to people that no-one, including deeply committed religious believers, has the right not to be offended. That is indeed an extremely important point, and the degree to which the opposite seems to be believed by the political and other chattering classes is horrifying and does not bode well. But I would add something else, too, which is that we shouldn’t, either, be too quick to accept one of the main premises of that particular debate (the debate about whether people should be protected from being offended). I’m talking about the premise that someone like Westergaard’s would-be-axe-murderer was really doing what he did because he was offended (which he may nevertheless have considered himself to be). Or, for that matter, that the whole world-wide eruption of violence over the original Mohammed cartoons was really all just because people felt offended.

I’m of the point of view advocated by Paul Berman and others: these attacks, this violence – all this is not happening because a Danish paper published some depictions of Mohammed (which it did, and which there was nothing wrong with) or because Israel is building settlements on Palestinian land (which it is and which there is a great deal wrong with) or because the United States props up the ruling family of Saudi Arabia (which I gather it does and which it probably shouldn’t). Rather the terrorism and the constant protests and the intimidation and the violence are driven by a simultaneously nihilistic and totalitarian agenda to attack the Occident (or what my father used to call, with great affection, the Abendland) and, ultimately, take over parts of it, as much indeed as possible. This does not need to mean that, say, Westergaard’s attacker had that particular ideology and big-picture agenda in mind when he attacked. The foot soldiers of a movement needn’t have a true understanding of the big picture in order to do their job and are often merely brainwashed fools. Westergaard’s attacker (his name, it seems, is not being published – why not?) may well have felt offended, or thought he felt offended. But why is it that, at this particular juncture in history, some Muslims, or at least some Islamists, respond to feeling offended by becoming violent, while, by and large, people of other persuasions don’t? Is it in the nature of Islamic belief itself? I don’t think that it is, and I say that not by way of hastening to insert the politically correct disclaimer (I don’t care whom I offend and if I thought  it was inherent in Islam I would be happy to say so). Rather, it’s because the totalitarian, anti-Occident movement that Berman identified is indoctrinating its foot soldiers to behave this way. It’s not that the cartoon gave offence so the offended man got angry and attacked (even if that’s what the attacker himself honestly believes). It’s that the cartoon offered the opportunity to construct a pretext for violence and intimidation, and the taking of offence is part of that construct. There is a deeply dishonest and sinister, and extremely broad and radical, agenda behind the attack on Westergaard. And that is true even if the attacker, in his foot-soldier childishness, really thinks that he was acting alone and purely out of his own personal anger. If he thinks that, then he is simply unaware of the degree to which he had already been taught and conditioned to do violence.

One big problem I have in this whole area, this whole debate about the giving and taking of offence and how much of it should be allowed or tolerated or whatever, is the apparently unlimited credence given, in the first place, to those claiming to be offended. I think we all ought to move quite decidedly away from the automatic assumption that, in any case, the feeling of being offended, whatever else we might come to say about it, is at least real in and of itself and worthy of discussion as being the thing it claims to be.

Back to the Middle Ages in Ireland

Fifteen years ago, this sort of thing would have been unimaginable. But a decade or so of terrorism against a free and secular West by religious extremists from the East, and a once-proudly-free society now cowed by both simple fear and an insidious and pathetically self-regarding political correctness, have already gotten things to the point where it not only happens but I am, to my own horror, not even shocked. (Hat tip: Norm)

Religiosity as an Evolved Trait

Atheists and agnostics might wonder: why is religious belief so widespread, and why is it so persistent? Why does there seem to be such a receptiveness to it in the human animal? How is it that a belief in the supernatural seems so natural as to appear almost inborn? Believers will point to this and say, “You see? God has created us with an instinct to believe,” or something along those lines. But there is a better hypothesis that is non-religious, and that is that humans evolved a tendency toward religious belief because this trait is advantageous. As the human species evolved, it became more and more conscious, and as it became more conscious it began to ask questions. Where did everything come from? What is life? What is death? Why are these things the way they seem to be? And so on. And with these questions came, perhaps, a sense of missing something, perhaps what we would today call “meaning”; there came, perhaps, a feeling of wanting more, something we might call, today, a “purpose” to live for. The idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing god (or other supernatural entity) that created “us” and cared about what we did could have been a satisfying answer to such questions and a powerful balm for such feelings. Those who believed in such things might well, therefore, have been happier than others. Evolution might have favoured them — after all, a happy and confident man gets more girls than an anxious and questioning nebbish, and a cheerful and unpreoccupied girl is much sexier than a pensive and uncertain one — and thus, quite plausibly, might a genetic tendency to believe in the supernatural have been selected for, and become almost as ineradicably established in humans as, say, the language instinct. Couple this with the strong tendency of people to pass on to their offspring pretty much everything they themselves were taught as children whether or not they still believe it as adults, and it’s not hard to see why Freud’s predicted “Future of an Illusion” has not yet arrived.

Creationists

How they limit their god, these “creationists” whose imaginations cannot embrace the thought that their supposedly omnipotent god might, in his omnipotence, have set a primordial soup a-simmer on the stove-top of eternity with the divine will that life evolve out of it in just the way that modern biologists suppose it did.

The Anti-Religionists

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others spend time and energy polemicising against religious belief. Why? They point to the undeniably great amount of harm to humanity that has been caused in the name of one religion or another. But religious belief has also motivated much charity and many good deeds. It is not at all obvious that the harm caused by religiosity outweighs the benefit it can take credit for.