Humanism is not a religion (Part 1)

At the beginning of his excellent introduction to humanism, Stephen Law (2011a) lists some of the things that characterize a humanistic outlook, including a respect for science, and reason more generally, and a commitment to moral values. Nowhere do humanists describe themselves as having faith (of the religious kind) in anything. Humanism does not involve belief in the gods or in the supernatural. Humanism is not a faith position, unless “having faith” can mean waking up in the morning and believing that there is an independently existing world.

There is also a clue in the word itself, which provides a hint to the attentive reader that a humanistic worldview is primarily concerned with humans rather than gods or chipmunks or badgers. Of course, insofar as humans have to do with gods or chipmunks or badgers, so too do humanists take an interest in those species of both the natural and imagined worlds. (See the series “Why do you care so much?”.)

Given that this is all pretty straightforward and uncontroversial, I was surprised to read the following in this Face to faith piece (accessed 02.12.11) by Savitri Hensman:

Christian, New Age, humanist or whatever, all would be welcomed, provided they played down aspects of their faith that might pose a challenge to mammon’s dominance.

(I’m not sure which I find more offensive as a humanist, being accused of having faith or being lumped in with the New Agers.)

The odd meaning of this isolated quote is understood in context as part of Hensman’s theme, that if “mammon-worship were a dominant religion” then mammon would have its own priests. She clearly regards this idea as ludicrous – what possible connection could there be between mammon and religion? – and yet I have often been struck by the theological character of the world of finance. The following is from my review of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (the quotes from pp. 79, 218, 229):

“Financial markets are a collection of arguments. The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument.” Theologians, like bond traders, depend upon a “meaningless flow of words” to keep their delusions alive; the Church, like Wall Street, employs smart people who are “basically wrong about everything” and a little too keen on self-regulation. And, strangely, church and finance both cater in their own ways to personal greed. After all, what is credit but the promise of having what you can’t afford, and salvation the promise of what doesn’t exist, eternal bliss?

24.11.11 The Bentham Lecture 2011: 300 Years of Hume (Peter Millican)

Why do philosophers (unlike historians, psychologists, etc.) continue to study Hume? The questions we call philosophical tend to be difficult and “progress by philosophers does not necessarily register as progress in philosophy” to outsiders.

Hume was a pioneer in the science of man, and his method has been useful recently in cognitive science (cf. Jerry Fodor). Philosophy is open to both new and old approaches. In discussions of the so-called hard problem of consciousness, we often hear that subjective experiences cannot have a physical basis, and it is thought that Hobbes’s notorious materialism (there is no soul stuff) can’t be true because matter can’t think. Hume showed that we cannot establish causation a priori just by sitting in an armchair, and therefore the idea that matter cannot give rise to consciousness is refuted. So many philosophers are ignorant of this point.

There is a current fashion for armchair metaphysics, all a priori, which is a very active area. “My own suspicion is that this fashion will fade” but the bandwagon will produce some decent philosophy (perhaps meta-metaphysics?).

The economists’ idea of a perfectly rational agent who always acts to maximize their utility is a fantasy. [cf. Frank]

Hume’s Fork: is this idea a relation of ideas or a matter of fact?

The reason of animals is largely instinctive [cf. System 1 thinking].

Hume’s dangerous message was that we are clever animals, not lower angels.

Darwin read lots of Hume and took him seriously. Compare these two passages, the first from Origin and the second from Dialogues:

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!

If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.

Hume’s treatment of the problem of evil (10 and 11) is essential for any student. How come there is disagreement and a range of interpretations of Hume’s writings? I believe the proliferation of interpretations is a sign of the immaturity of the field. Serious, careful Hume scholarship is relatively recent, and it is not yet the rule to back up a claim with citations to the text [I find this astonishing!]: when you make a claim, show where it came from.

Of miracles has generated a surprising diversity of reaction, with scholars misunderstanding terms, what is meant by the laws of nature, proof, etc., according to their own prejudice. Hume’s argument is far better than his critics would allow, but Millican still believes it is flawed, and there is room for multiple readings.

Hume was sceptical of faculty language, e.g. of talk of the faculty of reason, of the imagination, etc. H. H. Price is good on Hume (Hume’s Theory of the External World).

Millican believes 10.1 (accessed 29.11.11) is based on a presupposition that fails, since he doesn’t think Hume fully understood the logic of what has since become standard probability theory. We need to adjust to a “probability of testimony” in 10.13:

That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours 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.

So this should be:

That no testimony is sufficient to render a miracle more probable than not, unless the testimony be of such a kind that occurrence of false testimony of that kind would be even less likely than the fact which it endeavours to establish...

Hume is a giant of philosophy, of whom there are so few, compared with the more modern, modish philosophers. Millican noted the serendipity of Einstein reading Hume before he developed special relativity. Einstein acknowledged that positivism suggested his theory, and in a letter he emphasized the contribution of Hume above that of Mach. Hume encourages us to see connections everywhere, and in that sense is one of the least specialist philosophers.

Q&A

Millican gave a robust assessment of Rousseau (employing some arcane jargon) in response to a question about the Frenchman’s meeting with Hume – “Rousseau was an absolute nutter” – in contrast with Hume himself, who, by all accounts, was a thoroughly amiable and decent chap. Hume thought there might be a brotherhood between them, but it all ended in tears. Adam Smith regarded Hume very warmly.

To a question about Hume’s attitude towards induction, Millican referred to his own short paper, Is Hume an Inductive Sceptic? (Part of his answer made me think of System 1 thinking.)

In the Dialogues, Hume puts the following in the mouth of Philo:

...the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence...

This is Philo’s “confession”, which is saying almost nothing.

On his deathbed, the last paragraph Hume ever wrote, his final word, includes:

...whether the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought, be not energies that probably bear some remote analogy to each other...

This is what Millican meant by “artful writing”. Of course Hume was an atheist.

Millican’s own particular interest is in the social sciences, and spoke enthusiastically about how writing computer programs could be wonderful for philosophy. Against much inertia (“How many Oxford academics does it take to change a light bulb? Change?”), he has a new degree starting next year.

He finished with a suitable blast against religion, which has too much influence in society, corrupts our morals, and stands in the way of a secular society, which would be better for all of us.

Very reliable online versions of Hume’s works are available at http://www.davidhume.org/texts/.

Who do you think you are kidding, Dr Williams? (Part 1)

There are no famous theologians as there are famous footballers, historians, scientists, political leaders, etc., etc. (there are even famous cooks, for goodness’ sake), and so this series on theology (which will not last for eternity but will certainly feel like it) will be addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury, who is at least sort of famous for having been on telly and for having a pointy hat and pointy eyebrows, even if very few people (Christians included) could say what are his principal theological achievements.

To set the scene, consider the following remarkable statement by Sunday reporter Trevor Barnes concerning the UK Council of Christians and Jews (the UK’s first inter-faith group). The Council has, apparently, entered its “mature phase” and “is confident enough to explore theological differences and to subject absolute truth claims to rigorous intellectual scrutiny”.

First, “mature phase” might be expected to apply to a round of Stilton and not a committee. In fact, the phrase is apt, since, according to Barnes, earlier in its seventy-year history relations between Christians and Jews on the Council were somewhat tetchy, with both sides regularly throwing their opponents’ theologies out of the pram. (This is, of course, relative. Jews living, say, 700 years ago, when they were the subject of widespread discrimination and persecution, would no doubt have found tetchiness a positive relief. It’s not progress in theology that allows Christians and Jews to talk to one another without one side inventing the Ghetto to shovel their neighbours into. After all, if the Bible is the unchanging word of God, John 8:44 presumably means the same now as it did to the Christian rulers who expelled Jews from their countries and worse. Religious interpretation – that fickle whore – has actually been mercifully guided by the moral decency of humanism and prodded by secular arguments into turning a blind eye to all those biblical verses unambiguously endorsing hatred and violence.)

But I digress. It is not the detail of the Council’s discussion that is of interest, but their method, which it is claimed involves subjecting “absolute truth claims to rigorous intellectual scrutiny”. Is the presence of “absolute” here an insurance policy against empirical embarrassment?  “We’re not making truth claims relative to the universe,” the theologian seems to say, “the kind that mere science troubles itself over, the kind that can be settled by appeal to the facts. Oh no, our claims are absolute, and therefore beyond enquiry and reason and practical exploration. Our claims can only be backed by faith.”

What good “rigorous intellectual scrutiny” when the standard being used is faith and not reason? Anything goes! Clever people can be wrong about many things, and sometimes a group of clever people together can be very wrong, unless there is an error-detection mechanism at work. The ability to manipulate concepts and arguments is certainly an intellectual skill, but the conclusions reached count for nothing if care is not taken over the premises. There is a world of difference between a valid argument and a sound argument.

Charles Babbage, mathematician and computer scientist (1791–1871), is reputed to have said:

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The wrong premise at the core of every theological argument is the existence of some kind of super-agency. Of course, theological arguments are enthymemic with respect to this premise, which is taken as read: the existence of God is an example of a tacit assumption without which the conclusion of many theological arguments would be a non sequitur (Warburton 2008, p. 59).

I don’t know how the Council of Christians and Jews conducts its business, but I recently saw on stage what I imagine was a similar display of “rigorous intellectual scrutiny”: the RSC’s production of Written on the Heart (especially the opening scene as the scholars and priests – although not quite all fifty-four involved in the translation – gather in Ely House). Towards the end of the play, after years of work on the new translation of the Bible for King James, after countless discussions and disputes, there are still few remaining matters of contention, including whether “fold” should become “flock”.

E = mc² it ain’t.

22.11.11 A 21st-Century Séance (Dr Susan Blackmore)

Abstract When Susan Blackmore attended her first séance back in 1971 she already knew something of the history of spiritualism: its beginnings with two young girls in New York State in 1848, its rapid spread across America and Europe, and the Victorian rage for private séances where a medium might be gagged and bound inside a curtained cabinet while astonished sitters in the blacked-out room awaited “physical phenomena” such as disembodied voices, wisps of ectoplasm from the medium’s orifices, or even materialised spirits. She never experienced any such inexplicable thrills! Indeed after Michael Faraday’s conclusive experiments in 1853, and countless subsequent exposures of fraud one might have expected the whole circus to disappear. But no – it is still with us. After a decade of avoiding the paranormal, curiosity tempted her to accept an invitation to just such a séance in October 2011. She will report on what precautions she took, what happened, and whether or not she witnessed the promised inexplicable physical phenomena.

Susan Blackmore hadn’t been to a séance for thirty years when she received an email from “Clare” (not her real name) to a 21st-century séance. Sue got out of research into the paranormal and is now a thoroughgoing atheist unbeliever, but that transition resulted in her getting quite a bit of upsetting hate mail from believers who couldn’t understand how she could betray her former beliefs. (She pointed out that she never received hate mail from sceptics when she was a believer.)

The email contained the classic “open mind” line and Clare revealed that she regarded Sue as a project, a challenge, “a really hard nut sitting at the top of the pile of sceptics” whom she wanted to win over to belief. Sue accepted the invitation to a physical séance.

Physical mediumship is characterized by the following (supposed) spiritual phenomena:

• direct voice
• levitation
• apports (appearances out of thin air)
• transfiguration
• ectoplasm (the really exciting bit)
• full materialization and de-materialization

Sue admitted she wasn’t an expert on fraudulent séances, but she performed a few cursory checks of the garden shed where the great experience was due to happen. What was striking was how similar the setup was to Victorian seances – nothing much had changed in a hundred years. One of the few concessions to modernity was the use of plastic cable ties instead of leather straps around the arms of the medium. (Such binding is not much use if the arms of the chair are removable and the medium can just get up and walk about, but the arms of this chair seemed well fixed.)

Sue was expecting something special – not the otherworldly manifestations Clare was expecting, of course, but a ritual and solemn approach appropriate to the nurturing of altered states of consciousness. There was, however, a lack of seriousness, and no sense of spirituality even when the opening prayer was read out, or rather dictated like a shopping list. Instead, to accompany the tedious moaning and banging of the medium there was an Abba soundtrack.

When one of the participants felt the hand of the materialized spirit, she said, “It feels warm just like a real person.” At which point Sue had to hold back from shouting, “That’s because it is a real person!”

Sue was apologetic that she didn’t have more answers: “I don’t know what to make of it. Why do they do it?” Why are they convinced by a spirit calling himself “Yellow Feather” and doing a bad impersonation of a Native American Indian?

In a follow-up email, Clare reported that one of the others present (Jerry) had found the evening stimulating: “I’ve been trying to think of words to adequately describe what I felt and saw but it’s impossible.” And because of the rule against taking in any kind of recording device that might help with that description, we’ll never know what it was Jerry couldn’t describe. (See the Atman blog on the difficulties of transcribing experience.)

The participants in séances often express the desire to do good, although the good is couched in terms of the triumph of the “spiritual” over the “material”. They, like the rest of us, are natural-born dualists, but unlike some of us they don’t question the assumption that there is a non-physical, immaterial, independent “soul” separate to the body and which can survive death and communicate with the living.

Sue was glad to have taken part in the séance, but couldn’t see anything spiritual about the experience. She’s not religious, and so spiritual for her means asking the basic questions about what it is to be human, how we express kindness, love, wonder, purpose in our lives, what makes a good life. The trouble with the séance was that it fell short on pretty much all counts.

One reason why people engage in such activities is that it’s fun. (Spending two hours in a blacked-out shed with a bunch of spiritualists is not my idea of fun, although the tea and cake after would be nice.)

I personally can’t think of many worse ways of spending an evening. At least in church you might hear some fine music, and you could always doze off during the sermon. What really gets my motor running is theatre, which has its own rituals and special places, where experiences of all kinds can be had, without being weighed down with mumbo jumbo.

The Greeks had a word – eudaimonia – for a certain kind of happiness which translates literally as “good spirit” but which probably means something more like “human flourishing” or “life well lived” (Gilbert 2007, p. 36). I’m not sure they would be rushing to apply this word to the antics of these particular Abba afficionados. After two millennia, shouldn’t we have moved on from such activities? Or perhaps we should not be so quick to judge the quality of other people’s subjective experiences, as Gilbert elsewhere suggests?

The futility of prayer, Part 2

There is a moving final scene in Stephen MacDonald’s wonderful play about the friendship between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Not About Heroes. With only a week to go before the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, at 5:45 on the morning of 4 November, Wilfred Owen’s Company led the crossing of the Sambre Canal. His men remember him, going among them, encouraging them, joking with them. He began to help them to fix some duckboards at the edge of the water. That’s where he was machine-gunned to death. MacDonald continues (1987, p. 79):

The Armistice was signed exactly one week later... At eleven o’clock, the fighting stopped. At twelve o’clock, the victory bells were ringing out in Shrewsbury. Bands were playing, crowds cheering. His mother and father began, in gratitude, to pray. Then the telegram arrived.

The futility of prayer, Part 1

In this “What I'm really thinking” column (accessed 20.11.11), a terminally ill patient writes: “I can count my real friends on the two fingers that I'd like to raise to the rest of them”:

Then there's, “But I pray for you every day.” Every day? Does your compassionate God not tell you that he's heard your prayers before, to stop repeating yourself, get up off your knees, pick up the phone and talk to me instead?

On moral systems, Part 1

During an interview with General Lord Dannatt, during which the former head of the Army talked about whether the military could teach the rest of society anything about moral values, Edward Stourton put the following question (Sunday 13.11.11):

The other question it raises is whether it’s proper to talk about instilling moral values or whether what you’re essentially doing in the armed forces is instilling a code of conduct, because if you’re talking about instilling moral values you are talking about using a moral system, and it’s quite difficult to see how you do that in a society where there isn’t a consensus about, for example, Christian belief.

This reveals several questionable assumptions, which are common in discussions about moral values.

• Repeated use of “instilling” implies a blank slate view of human nature, in which things like moral values have to be acquired by children from adults. Against the blank slate view is a variety of compelling evidence (Pinker 2002), including our possession of an innate language instinct. There is also growing evidence of an innate moral sense.
• It is assumed that religion and ethics naturally go together, which is not surprising given that Sunday is a BBC “Religion & Ethics” production (there is no BBC category called “Atheism & Ethics”).
• There is a blind spot, in that secular moral values which might cross both national and cultural boundaries aren’t in the frame.
• Strangely in this religious context, there is a kind of relativism at work. The reference to a consensus about Christian belief implies that a Christian’s moral values may differ from those of another religion.

With the phrase “code of conduct” Stourton distinguishes between arbitrary social conventions (e.g. the rules of football) and what he probably believes are absolute moral values (e.g. it wrong to commit murder). However, these supposedly absolute moral values, if they are handed down by God, are actually as arbitrary as the rules of football, in that goodness is determined by fiat rather than by appeal to a standard of goodness that is independent of God (as shown by the Euthyphro dilemma).

For the religious, where lies the true distinction between the arbitrary and the absolute?

Moral values originating from a supernatural source have all the same problems as divinely revealed knowledge: how do you know whether such knowledge can be trusted? This holy book says one thing, which is contradicted by another holy book. In this scheme, there are as many moral systems as there are people who claim to be able to communicate with the divine: no wonder the religious are often confused about what is right and what is wrong!

Recognizing the natural origin of moral values would help clear up much of this confusion, and allow progress to be made in ethics. No one would claim that the rules of football are part of human nature. They have to be taught explicitly. In contrast, according to Boyer (2001, p. 198), we “all have moral intuitions (‘My friend left her purse here, I must give it back to her’), moral judgements (‘He should have returned his friend’s purse’), moral feelings (‘He stole his friend’s purse, how revolting!’), moral principles (‘Stealing is wrong’) and moral concepts (‘wrong’, ‘right’)” that are part of a normally developed human nature.

A Darwinian perspective enables a better understanding of both the origin of moral behaviour and how it develops in humans, and it also provides the fundamental polarity that is the basis of many moral values: what is good or bad for the organism is what allows that organism to flourish or causes it to suffer. This principle operates deep within the physical world (even single-celled organisms are either repelled or drawn towards stimuli), and in that sense it is “absolute” in that all life respects it. Of course, that “absolute” does not survive translation into complex domains: what is good for the lion (a meal of freshly killed gazelle) is not good for the gazelle, and what is good for the gazelle (the lion and her cubs starve) is not good for the lion.

One of the major themes of Robert Frank’s (2011) latest book, The Darwin Economy, is that there is often a conflict between the interests of individuals and those of the group. Darwin recognized this at work in many of the species he observed, and Frank recognizes the same conflict in our economic life.

There is I think a sense in which moral behaviour is an attempt to resolve this conflict, or at least turn down the volume. After all, one man on a desert island would find it easier to follow the ten commandments than one man in New York. Only in the presence of other people do we have to worry about whether our interests align with theirs. Out of all the animals, of course, humans are best equipped to reflect upon their situation and to take steps to mitigate their bad behaviour.