Editor's note: Like my colleague Georges Rey, whose essay appears below, many of us ended up in philosophy in part because of an interest in issues about the existence of God. Judging by student reactions in class and the perennial discussions in The Diamonback, interest in questions about religion hasn't diminished on campus over the years. Georges Rey offers a rather surprising take on the whole controversy. I disagree with him, but I admire the brashness of his hypothesis and the clarity of the case he makes. So I asked him if he would give me a version of his view that could be included in Logo. He graciously agreed to do so.
And in the interest of furthering the debate, I have also solicited a reply to George Rey's essay by Chris Bernard, one of our graduate students, who has a particularly strong interest in this topic. There is a link to Chris's reply at the end of George's essay. But the conversation doesn't stop with these two contributions. We've already gotten replies from other readers -- see the link below. If you want to join the debate, please send e-mail to stairs@glue.umd.edu. I can't promise that we'll print everything. But we will print as many strong, well-argued replies on each side as we reasonably can.
Meta-Atheism
-Georges Rey, Department of Philosophy
When I was a child, I seemed to believe in God for a while, and for a few years attended church and prayed fervently. And, like many people, I had the grand issues of His existence as some of my first philosophical concerns. Those concerns have survived in my taste for religious art and music, such as Buddhist statuary, Gothic churches, and Bach's St. Matthew Passion (now there's an argument!). I also have deep respect for the serious good religious people sometimes (but not always) do -- Think of Ghandi or Dorothy Day, for example. But my concern here is not with what religious people do, but rather with the content of what many of them say they believe. The more seriously I think about it, the more bizarre I find it. I find myself thinking that, if this content were removed from the rich aesthetic and cultural traditions in which it is standardly presented, it would be regarded as, frankly, psychotic, rather like the delusions of paranoids who think that there are invisible psychological agents, with larger than life powers, with whom they enjoy some special "super-natural" communication. It seems to me so overwhelmingly obvious that there are no such beings in either case -as most introductory texts make plain, the usual arguments for the existence of God are patently fallacious- that I have come to entertain the idea that, actually, no reasonable person really does believe in God, despite what they may say or consciously "think" to themselves. For want of a better name, I call this view "meta-atheism." It says
Despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived.
Notice that this view isn't a view about whether God exists, but about whether people actually believe that He does. By the word "God" I mean a being who thinks, knows, desires, etc., who is not subject to the laws of nature, who cares about the good, and who either created the physical world or can intervene in it. If you use the word "God" very differently from this, then what I say here most likely won't bear on your views.
I used the word "psychotic" above. But please understand: I don't think that most religious people are psychotics nor even insincere. Rather, I think that many of them are engaged in a form of self-deception, a little like a wife who ignores the evidence of her husband's infidelity. This is an extension of the familiar observation that most religious stories involve patent wishful thinking. I don't pretend to able to establish this view conclusively, but I think it is a serious possibility that would explain a number of striking peculiarities of so-called religious belief. I count at least eight such peculiarities.
(1) Detail Resistance If you believe something, you are normally interested in the details. But whereas scientists regularly ask about the details of the "Big Bang", it seems silly to inquire into similar details of how God created the world. Just how did God's saying, "Let there be light," actually bring about light? How did He "say" anything at all? (does He have a tongue?). If he "designed" it, or things in it,how did he do that? With blueprints? Of the distribution of forces, and maybe even of specific DNA?? Leave Biblical literalism aside. Just answer: how does He do what believers say He does? Does anyone really believe that such questions have answers? When I pose these questions to "believers," I find they find them quite "silly." But, by contrast, the same people don't find it the least bit silly to inquire into the details of the O.J. Simpson trial: how he got to the airport in time, whether that was his DNA or not. The seriousness of their beliefs about the case is revealed in part by their feeling responsible to account for such details.
(2) Comparability to Fiction We don't believe fiction. But theistic resistance to detail is strikingly like our attitude toward fictional stories. It seems as silly to ask for details about God's workings as to ask what Hamlet had for breakfast or just how Dorothy and Toto made it full over the rainbow.
(3) Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence Absence of evidence counts against typical beliefs. Imagine someone saying that Nicole Simpson was murdered by a supposed lover she had in Las Vegas. We would want evidence of this lover and of his presence at the scene of the crime. If no evidence is forthcoming -- no data presented that couldn't be perfectly well explained by alternative hypotheses -- then this very lack of evidence becomes evidence of his non-existence.
Many who claim to believe also claim that they have evidence; but it's usually of a patently anecdotal kind that most of us know very well is both unreliable and subject to a multitude of alternative explanations. Indeed, I find in discussion that people typically don't present serious evidence for God's existence; instead they retreat to the trivial task of showing that God's existence is compatible with the data. But most any hypothesis can be made compatible with any, given enough latitude with acceptable stories.
(4) Appeals to "Mystery" Confronted with such oddities, many theists claim God is a "mystery," --and, indeed, I once heard a famous convert, Malcolm Muggeridge, claim "mystery" as his reason for believing! But ignorance (=mystery!) is standardly a reason not to believe something. Imagine the police arresting you merely because it's a "mystery" how you could have murdered Smith!.
(5) Merely Symbolic Status of the Stories Unlike the case of typical beliefs, the hold of most religious stories doesn't really seem to consist in their supposed truth. Consider the tremendously moving story of the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and ask yourself whether, were we really trying to achieve justice in the world, his "dying for our sins" would be even remotely appropriate. And even if this kind of proxy atonement did make sense, we could still ask whether He suffered enough! I don't mean to say that His betrayal and crucifixion weren't pretty awful; but can they really "balance" all the horror of the Holocaust, the Gulag, or what death squads routinely do to their victims in Latin America (to just begin to enumerate what's at stake)? Of course all this is less relevant if we take the passion story as merely symbolic fiction, i.e. not as actually a rectifying of wrongs. Symbols needn't share the magnitudes of what they symbolize.
(6) Betrayal by Reactions and Behavior People's reactions and behavior (e.g. grief, mourning) do not seem seriously affected by their supposed "belief" in a Hereafter. Imagine a young "believing" couple. He is dying from a painful disease. Would she really rejoice at the prospect of his going to heaven, and of joining him herself when she dies, as though he'd just gone off for a great --eternal!- cure in a luxurious resort in Miami? I betcha she'd grieve and mourn "the loss" like anyone else. (Note that most all religious music and rituals surrounding death are deeply sad -seldom, if ever, joyous).
In a related vein, if people really believe in the efficacy of prayer, they should be willing to have the National Institute of Health do a controlled study of the effects of prayer, just as they would if they believed that soy beans cured cancer. (And why does no one expect prayer to cure wooden legs?)
(7) Belief is Not a Matter of Choice Religious belief, understood as faith, is supposed to be at least partly a matter of choice. But try to decide to seriously believe that there is an even number of stars, or that there are gigantic cats on distant planets. Imagine how puzzling it would be to if someone claimed merely to "have faith" about these things.
Of course, it might be replied that it's appropriate to have faith only about certain things. But which things? I suspect you can have "faith" only about what isn't really a serious contender for truth. Perhaps it's a different kind of attitude than belief, perhaps merely, like a wedding vow, a determination to live a certain way, and to be prepared to consciously think and say certain things. Perhaps that's a kind of attentuated belief --or perhaps, again, it's exactly the phenomenon of self-deception!
Perhaps "religious faith" is a commitment merely to be prepared to consciously think and say certain things. Perhaps that's a kind of attentuated belief -or perhaps, again, it's exactly the phenomenon of self-deception!
(8) Projection People have a curious inclination to project their reactions to the world into the world itself: one feels awe before high mountains, or at the vastness of the seas and then supposes that there is some appropriate property in the mountains or the sea. Finding out that it is just the play of natural properties, such as light on a certain scale, doesn't seem enough; and so we project some "supernatural" property corresponding to our deeply felt reaction -- a property, that unlike the mere play of light, somehow intrinsically deserved that reaction. ("Mysteriousness" would seem to be a particularly striking case in point. Click the link for an explanation.)
So I suspect that many people's belief in God is more like a pretense of belief, like what we bear to an entrancing story (or our parent's honesty or our spouse's fidelity) that we very much wish were true even though we know better. I repeat: I don't pretend to have established this view "beyond any reasonable doubt." But I hope it leads you to think about the above peculiarities of religious "belief" and how otherwise they are to be explained.
© Copyright Georges Rey, 2000. Do not reproduce or distribute without permission
For Chris Bernard's response, click HERE
For other replies, click HERE
To reply yourself, click HERE
