atheism

Secularists who say that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong.  Evaluate this statement. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

Philosophical secularists such as Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins have often criticised Christianity for causing unhappiness.  Freud saw all religion as a “universal obsessional neurosis” which supported irrational beliefs and behaviour and created taboos which are often harmful to individuals.  While Freud admitted the usefulness of religion in “keeping down the masses” in his “Civilisation and its Discontents” (1927), Dawkins went further, claiming that religion is the “root of all evil” and the cause of multiple personal and social problems because it is anti-intellectual and as a meme corrosive to the critical faculties, particularly of the young.  Christianity, Dawkins suggests, may seem benign… but really indoctrinates people into a backward ideology which provides questionable moral guidance.  While these arguments seem persuasive and certainly highlight personal and social problems that religion in general, sometimes Christianity, might contribute towards, overall, they don’t demonstrate that Christianity causes unhappiness.  This is because people may well be happier with the crutch of an “obsessional neurosis” than without one, because the good the Church still outweighs the bad and because confronting the truth and being a critical thinker is rarely conducive to happiness!  For these reasons, secularists such as Freud and Dawkins are wrong when they say that Christianity is a source of unhappiness. 

Firstly, Freud argued that religion causes unhappiness because it is a “universal obsessional neurosis”.  In the same way as an individual might deal with unresolved childhood trauma by channelling tension into ritualistic behaviours such as obsessional handwashing or superstitions such as saluting magpies or not treading on cracks, societies deal with trauma by channelling it into religion.  For example, in Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud claimed that the Judaeo-Christian tradition emerged as a response to an original act of patricide, a claim which he later elaborated in Moses and Monotheism (1939).  Nevertheless, Freud’s critique of religion does not claim that Christianity is always a source of unhappiness.  People may find it easier to cope when they have a ritual which they believe influences feelings and situations which they cannot otherwise control.  Societies might well function better when they are able to process their collective guilt and grief through religious myth and ritual than they would without such an opportunity.  Just because a belief or practice is irrational and/or not based on a scientific or historical truth does not mean that it necessarily makes people unhappy.  Further, influenced by Feuerbach, Freud suggested that God is subconsciously created by human beings in an act of wish-fulfilment, rather than the other way around.  Feuerbach wrote “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge” and Freud would certainly have agreed, judging by his “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) Nevertheless, since when did self-knowledge cause people unhappiness, especially when it results in beliefs that comfort and compensate for deficits as in this case?  Also, as Swinburne, Plantinga and Hick have pointed out, Freud can’t exclude the possibility that God might have designed us to subconsciously project God in this way.  As Alston pointed out in 1967 “Freudian theory is not logically incompatible with the truth, justifiability and value of traditional religion…”  and also, projecting God fulfils wishes and so makes people happy, not unhappy suggesting that as a secularist Freud was wrong that Christianity is a cause of unhappiness.

Secondly, Dawkins argued that religion causes unhappiness because it is “anti-intellectual” and -acting as a meme – attacks the critical faculties, particularly of young people.  Nevertheless, Dawkins has no scientific evidence for the existence of memes in the way that he describes them, and further if they do exist in this way, by Dawkins own logic they must do so because they confer an evolutionary advantage of some sort.  The fact is that more people are affected by the religious “meme” than are not – and those who are affected seem much more likely to breed! – so there must be an evolutionary justification for religion.  Of course, Dawkins would reject the claim that human beings should follow evolutionary pressures, writing “we should not live by Darwinian principles… I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free-will…” and yet he fails to explain why people should believe the free-will to do this, when there is no evidence other than a feeling to support it, or why we should try to behave in ways that make our individual and human genes more generally less likely to be reproduced.  Further, Dawkins rejects religious belief because “how can you take someone seriously who likes to believe something because he finds it comforting?” yet this line of argument shows that religion – including Christianity – makes people happy, while also admitting that secularism does not.  It is what Dawkins calls “bracing truth” that makes people unhappy, not Christian beliefs, even if they are false.  As Dawkins himself wrote “the universe doesn’t owe is condolence or consolation; it doesn’t owe you a nice warm feeling inside…” yet for many people this is precisely what they get from religion.  While Dawkins claims that “I care passionately about the truth because it is a beautiful thing and enables us to live a better life…” he fails to justify these claims.  What is beautiful about the truth of evolution through natural selection and what helps us to live a better life about confronting our own insignificance in the meaningless infinity of the universe? This shows that the secularist Richard Dawkins was wrong in claiming that Christianity makes people unhappy. 

Of course, Freud and Dawkins make sensible points when they argue that religion and particularly Christian beliefs make some individuals and some societies unhappy.  Freud is right that the guilt engendered by faith can be corrosive, leading to the state of “soul sickness” identified by both St Augustine and much later by William James.  Yet, religious faith, an ineffable sense of happiness and peace, hope and a second chance at purposeful living can sometimes be precipitated by such a state of despair, when it triggers a conversion experience.  St Augustine describes how he was saved by such an experience and James documented many other cases where religion – most usually Christianity – made somebody happy when no dosage of antidepressants were ever likely to work. Further, while Christianity can make individuals unhappy, social surveys have shown that on average religion makes people happier, more socially engaged, healthier and more long-lived.  As the Heritage Foundation Report (2006) states “a steadily growing body of evidence from the social sciences demonstrates that religious practice benefits individuals, families and communities, and thus the nation as a whole.”  Of course, Dawkins is right that religions can and have caused bitter wars and can and have fostered appalling abuse.  Christopher Hitchens powerfully enumerated the instances when the Roman Catholic Church alone has caused conflict and suffering.  Yet religion is also a force for good in societies, encouraging people to care for the weak and vulnerable, educate children, improve prison conditions and be more inclusive.  While it is difficult to do an objective cost-benefit analysis, Jurgen Habermas is right in highlighting that secular societies develop what he called “an awareness of what is missing” as they enter a “moral wasteland” in which society becomes “normatively mute” and where individuals lack any sense that their actions matter one way or another, as well as any hope beyond death.  Charles Taylor is right that secularism makes death into a taboo in a way that creates mental health issues, and that societies are forced to replace religious values and mores with secular equivalents – which lack the advantages of relative transparency and transcending human borders.  It follows that notwithstanding the unhappiness that religion undoubtedly causes some individuals and societies, on balance the effect of religion is to make people more rather than less happy.  As regards Christianity – given the scale of abuse and conflict that it has caused – the scales might be more even than in the case of other religions, yet the scale might well be proportionate given that Christianity is the largest world religion. Also, it is probably fair to say that if religion did not cause the abuse and the conflict, then something else would have.  Atheistic societies such as the USSR and Communist China were not marked for being inclusive and peaceful!   Human beings tend to cause abuse, conflict and unhappiness… and need little encouragement from religion to do so. 

In conclusion, Secularists who say that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong.  While Christianity and other religions undoubtedly cause some individuals unhappiness, as well as giving cover to abuse and conflict on multiple occasions, the net effect of religions is to promote human happiness, even if this might well be the result of promoting comforting delusions.  The continuing dominance of religious worldviews suggests that they offer societies an evolutionary advantage, perhaps in helping people to be satisfied with not knowing the answers to the “big questions,” and this confirms that societies are happier and function better with religions than without them.

“Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools!” Discuss

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

In his Proslogium Chapter II St Anselm quoted Psalm 14:1 “the fool says in his heart there is no God” and then attempted to demonstrate that atheists are indeed fools in asserting a straight contradiction – that God (who necessarily exists by definition) does not exist.  Gaunilo responded in his wittily titled “On behalf of the Fool”, using his famous “perfect island” analogy to reduce St Anselm’s argument to absurdity as part of a more sophisticated multi-pronged attack.  Despite the fact that St Anselm attempted to refute Gaunilo’s points in his Responsio, Gaunilo succeeded in showing that Atheists are not in fact fools. 

Firstly, Gaunilo reduced Anselm’s argument in Proslogium II to absurdity, pointing out that “if a man should try to prove to me by such reasoning that this island truly exists… either I should believe that he was jesting, or I know not which I ought to regard as the greater fool: myself supposing I should allow him this proof or him, if he should suppose that he had established with any certainly the existence of this island…”  Anselm was right to object, noting how God is not like an island or any other thing in time and space, so that while God is capable of necessarily existing, the island is not.  “I promise confidently that if any man shall devise anything existing either in reality of in concept alone (except that than which nothing greater can be conceived) to which he can adapt the sequence of my reasoning, I will discover that thing, and will give him his island, not to be lost again…” However, in practice Gaunilo’s point still stands because asserting God’s necessary existence cannot take us beyond the world of words and ideas. As Kant (in his Critique of Pure Reason 1787) and later Russell pointed out, existence is not a predicate and adds nothing to the concept of an object to make it more perfect and therefore a necessary property of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”.  Kant wrote “Being is evidently not a real predicate, or a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the admission of a thing, and of certain determinations in it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment.” Further, to exist means to exist within – or at least to have an effect within – time and space.  As Kant later pointed out, contingency is of the essence of existence – having the capability to exist or not exist, to exist here and not there or now and not then.  To use Kant’s words, all existential claims must be synthetic; he wrote “If, then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…”  While Kant’s criticism has been rejected by both Hegel and Quine for being “dogmatic” and based on assertion rather than proper argument, and while Norman Malcolm also rejected Kant’s claim writing  “In those complex systems of thought, those “language games”, God has the status of a necessary being.  Who can doubt that?  I believe that we can rightly take the existence of those religious systems of thought in which God features as a necessary being as disproof of the dogma affirmed by Hume (and Kant of course) that no existential proposition may be necessary…”, in practice Kant’s criticism appeals to common sense, as Gaunilo’s did.  It is unreasonable to claim that something exists when there is no way to see hear, touch, smell or taste it and when its effects are not observable on things that we can hear, touch, see, smell or taste either.  It may be true that the meaning of words depends on how they are used rather than on what they refer to in some cases, but not when it comes to existence!  Whatever people understand by the word gravity within a form of life will not change the fact that if you jump off a cliff you will fall to your death.  Similarly, you can’t define something into existence; as Gaunilo rightly pointed out, to suggest otherwise can only be construed as “a charming joke” (Schopenhauer dismissed the Ontological argument for being such) or plain foolish.  In this way, Gaunilo succeeded in showing that atheists are not in fact fools, but that advocates of the Ontological Argument might well be.  

Secondly, Gaunilo is right to point out that Anselm’s claim that Atheists are fools because they hold a contradictory idea in their minds is mistaken.  While Anselm suggests that the atheist conceives of God – who necessarily exists – not existing in much the same way as a fool might conceive of a five-sided triangle, through simply not understanding anything, Gaunilo points out that people can conceive of lots of non-existing things without being in the slightest foolish.  Take the Gruffalo for one example… many people have an idea of this frightening creature in their mind, while also knowing that there is no such creature outside the pages of a storybook.  He wrote “in my understanding, as I still think, could be all sorts of things whose existence is uncertain, or which do not exist at all…”  Aquinas agreed with Gaunilo, writing “the opposite of the proposition “God exists” can be mentally admitted.” Summa Theologica 1:2:1 and much later, Kant also agreed that it is perfectly possible to conceive of God while rejecting any claim that God exists, writing “If then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…” Anselm tries in this as well to distinguish between God and other things, writing “if that thing can be conceived at all, it must exist” because God alone, as that than which nothing greater can be conceived of, must necessarily exist.  Later, Charles Hartshorne agreed with Anselm, pointing out that either God is impossible, or that he exists contingently or that he exists necessarily.  The Ontological Argument shows that God cannot exist contingently – or He would not be worthy of worship or “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” and Hartshorne argues that God’s existence is not impossible, leaving only the possibility that God exists necessarily.  Nevertheless, Gaunilo points out that Anselm is mistaken in claiming that because we can only conceive of God necessarily existing, he necessarily exists.  This is not how we conceive of things; the artist conceives of an object before they put brush to canvas, so the idea exists “in intellectu” before and prior it it being “in re” – the idea of an object and the object are two separate and separable things in all cases, including God.  I could conceive of God as a necessarily existing being, but my conception of him would be something separate from his actual existence as what I have conceived of, leaving open the possibility that He could be only an idea in the mind, however apparently contradictory that might be. Again, as Kant wrote, “Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside it, in order to attribute to it existence..” In this way as well, therefore, Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools.  

Thirdly, Gaunilo argues that some atheists could recognise the word “God” without having an idea of what God is sufficiently for it to contain a contradiction, which is convincing.  I might recognize the word “squircle” – and even begin to appreciate what concept it might refer to – while still unable to conceive of a square-circle properly.  The squircle is therefore not “in intellectu”, let alone “in re” despite my accepting the definition of a squircle as a square circle.  As Russell later pointed out, if I say “the present King of France is bald” it seems like I am making a sensible proposition that is capable of being true or false, but actually because there is no present King of France, the proposition is not capable of being either true or false and is therefore meaningless.  Is it not possible that when the Atheist accepts that “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” they do no more than you might in momentarily wondering if the present King of France is bald? On reflection they then conclude that there is no present King of France, so the question is meaningless.  In relation to Anselm’s argument, the Atheist then reflects on the concept of necessary existence and concludes that it is impossible, so the concept of God is impossible and the Ontological argument meaningless.  Here as well, Gaunilo showed that the Atheist is not a fool, but rather a person too sophisticated to be taken in by what Schopenhauer called Anselm’s “sleight of hand trick“.  

Finally, Gaunilo points out that nobody can have a complete conception of the nature of God, because God’s nature is to be mysterious, unlike any other thing and greater than that which can be conceived of. It follows that – Atheist or not – without a clear idea of God it is impossible to analyse that idea and find existence or necessary existence within it.  He explained “I do not know that reality itself which God is, nor can I form a conjecture of that reality from some other like reality.  For you yourself assert that reality is such that there can be nothing else like it…” Later, Aquinas agreed, writing “because we do not know the nature of God, the existence of God is not self-evident” Summa 1.2.1 Although Anselm defends against this criticism vigorously, writing “It is evident to any rational mind, that by ascending from the lesser good to the greater, we can form a considerable notion of a being than which a greater is inconceivable” and “If he denies that a notion may be formed from other objects of a being than which a greater is inconceivable… let him remember that the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world are clearly seen…” Gaunilo’s point stands because Anselm’s reasoning reduces God to being the greatest of things, rather than that than which nothing greater can be conceived of.  By Anselm’s own reasoning in Proslogion III God’s nature is not like the nature of other things and God’s greatness is not like the greatness of other things.  While other things exist contingently, God exists necessarily, so it is not possible to “ascend from the lesser good to the greater” or to build an understanding of God’s nature from an understanding of created things.  Further, in 1948 JN Findlay argued that “it was indeed an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof.  For on that day, he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.”  If Anselm is serious in Proslogion III that necessary existence is a necessary property of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” then in addition to making it impossible for anybody to have sufficient grasp of the concept of God to analyse it and find existence within it, it also makes God’s existence impossible.  As Findlay reasoned, a contingent being would not deserve worship & wouldn’t really be God, but a necessary being is a logical absurdity, meaning that Anselm’s argument proves that God’s existence is impossible.  In this way as well, therefore, Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools… but JN Findlay showed that Anselm was! 

In conclusion, Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools.  While Anselm easily heads off his “perfect island” criticism by pointing towards the more developed version of the argument he already presented in Proslogium III in his Responsio, Gaunilo’s full critique demonstrates that Anselm’s reasoning is unsound.  While Anselm’s a priori definition of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is reasonable, Gaunilo showed that he is wrong to assume that accepting this definition entails having a clear enough idea of God to analyse and find necessary existence within.  Gaunilo also showed that Anselm was wrong to ignore the existence of two separate stages in conceiving of any object, that of having an idea “in intellectu” and that of appreciating that the idea exists “in re.”  As Kant later agreed, it is perfectly possible to have an idea of a necessarily-existing being (God) while appreciating that there is no instance of such a being, however contradictory that might seem, because the world of ideas and the world of existence are separate and separable and it is not possible to define something into existence or prove God’s necessary existence from reason alone.