Thanks for sharing this, great read, love this analysis:
“Spinoza and Kierkegaard are very different thinkers in many ways, but I see them as connected in this resistance to objectified religion. Spinoza’s insistence that religion is a virtue – as you put it, a way of life – resonates with Kierkegaard’s view that religion is a matter of “how” rather than “what.” It is a matter of how you orient your life; how to relate to yourself, to other people, and to God; how you think and feel and act.”
I recalled reading somewhere that Einstein's idea of "God" has its origin to Spinoza's. Can someone familiar with the topic please point me to a related book?
Sorry I don't have a link but Einstein said in a personal letter to someone something to the effect that 'his god is the god of Spinoza'. Basically, his biographers believe Einstein didn't believe in a.ny kind of literal god as proposed by the major religions
Hard disagree. Or rather, faith, in anything, can be as you describe (a non-religious example being politicians), but it doesn't have to be (and shouldn't be).
Whether a person is optimistic or pessimistic in the face of unknown is a matter of faith. Values/morals, even outside of an organized religion, are still a matter of faith (not that they'll be rewarded, but that they're somehow better, even in situations you'd be advantaged by disregarding them). That there is value in life, in expression, etc, are all matters of faith, as for every bit of rational evidence that there is benefit in them, there is also rational evidence that there are issues in them. The fact philosophers don't end up in the same place indicates there are, at minimum, different axioms over what is valuable or necessary in the first place.
Whether faith happens to also include a concept of god is immaterial; most if not all of us operate under concepts just as immaterial but which nevertheless we believe in.
dqpb, lostcolony, I believe you two are operating with different meanings of the word "faith". Let's ban the word for the sake of the argument. Care to reformulate your arguments without using it?
Lostcolony, I believe you are using a far more nebulous and encompassing definition for the word compared to dqpb who I think operates with a more concrete and narrow definition.
Agreed, "faith" gets equivocated quite regularly (whether on purpose or otherwise) in these types of discussion. It helps to be clear on what definition one is using.
Belief in something without evidence. This encompasses religion/spirituality, but so much more. Which is my point.
If dnub cares to explicitly call out religion, as a specific subset and distinct from faith, the arguments I'd make are largely the same. I see very little difference in the evidence between "I believe there is a knowable God(s) who would have me be kind", "I believe there is a concept of 'god' that would have me be kind", and "I believe being kind is the 'right' thing to do"; none of them rely on refutable claims.
I agree that that’s a crucial distinction. One can take on beliefs for tactical or strategic reasons, to increase one’s well-being or likelihood of success. But if one doesn’t adjust those beliefs in the face of contradicting evidence and/or based on Bayesian reasoning, then that’s counterproductive and harmful.
If by 'faith' (per the parent) you mean religious faith, sure it can. Plenty of people have stopped believing in a god, started believing in a god, or come to a new understanding of their god.
Maybe what you mean is 'blind faith', i.e., a rejection of evidence contrary to what you want to believe, to which I will again point out is not unique to religion, by pointing to politics, and the quote of our past president "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening", and the millions willing to accept that.
I take issue with two aspects of faith as it's often used in religion / spirituality / metaphysics:
1. When faith is claimed to have a direct physical effect. For example, faith healing in which ones faith conjures divine intervention, or in the Christian Science sense where faith directly alters your physical reality, or in The Secret where faith in having something "attracts" it to you, etc. The malware in this idea is that it corrupts the very concept of evidence. If you try to find evidence that it doesn't work - by having faith and not observing the proposed effects - it's nullified by saying you just didn't have enough faith.
2. When faith exploits our innate social impulses. For example: Jesus died for your sins, how cruel of you to deny him. Or if you don't have faith you will be excluded from the club of Heaven and you will be permanently separated from all your friends and family who were true believers. Or when not having faith alienates you from your existing friends, family, and community. The malware here is that it short-circuits your natural process of observe->think->decide and turns it into observe->consider-social-contract->think->decide. If someone presents you with a good argument for why something is or isn't true, but it violates the social contract of your faith (ensuring your initial impulse is to feel guilt and fear), then you are short-circuited from thinking.
Both of these are perfectly fair to object to! But they're not solely relegated to religion; both of those issues also show up all the time in secular circles.
Back to politics, QAnon is an obvious example, but even something as 'comparatively' sane as trickle down economics suffers both of those as well (for the first, "it's not working" - "we just have to cut rich peoples' taxes more! And quit spending so much on social services!"; for the second, "we should tax the rich more and spend it on social services" "What are you, some sort of socialist?! This is -America-, the best goddamn country in the world! Love it or leave it!").
Too narrow a view of faith. Kirkegaard wrote of a “leap of faith” by which the will and passion necessary to believe in yourself and your abilities is inherently spiritual. Rather than a blind leap, we use reason to literally and figuratively reach for the stars, be it another continent in Polynesian canoes or another planet aboard rocket thrusters. Feature not a bug of human ingenuity tied to purpose.
I’m raising three, they each have their own spark, no? Calling it natural and innate is just as underspecified as saying God-given or lucky or a leap of faith.
This type of reasoning is in my mind a typical expression of how mere cultural values create an unhealthy bias. It is similar in this respect to how the Inuit might consider whale flubber a great delicacy, or a Swede might enjoy fermented herring, whereas everyone else looks on in distaste, and will tend to express their dislike in universal terms.
That is not the same you might argue, and you'd be right of course. But there are so many overlaps that is certainly motivated to call it similar: We are weaned into a secular disdain for religion - at least in many parts of the world - just as the Inuit are weaned into their food culture. It is not primarily a function of our superior intellect that we look down on religion, it is a function of our age and time. We will eventually abandon our present hubris for something else, just as people under the monotheistic era departed from the previous animistic and polytheistic beliefs.
So what is unhealthy about it? wasn't the monotheistic religions a big step forward that allowed for greater societal cohesion and (in most places) a rule of law? Isn't a secular society a much better place than before, where beliefs are not passed down from above in a unintelligible language and jealously guarded by the elites that profited from the system?
Well the key term is probably "step forward" as opposed to right and wrong. It is not like the Inuits are wrong in their eating habits - but uninformed and biased people might be prone to think so. It is not like the polytheists were wrong, in spite of the persecution they endured. And it is not like we are right in our present thinking either - a step forward in many respects, yes. But we will one day also be ridiculed for our primitive assumptions about reality - by the biased people of the future.
Provided we all survive the present at all, our present and ubiquitous self-righteousness sure looks poised to snuff out whatever future we may dream of.
> So what is unhealthy about it? wasn't the monotheistic religions a big step forward that allowed for greater societal cohesion and (in most places) a rule of law?
Huh?
Greece. Rome. Polytheism could accommodate monotheism. Monotheism could not accommodate polytheism or different monotheisms. How is intolerance a step forward?
Well first of all, I don't believe "tolerance" is useful for evaluating historical epochs as if from a position of absolute truth. It is mainly a construct, which rapidly falls apart at further inspection: at most something which arbitrarily occurs towards a variety of human expression at specific times in specific places. But above all, what we call "tolerance" today is hardly applicable to societies that practiced slavery, considered women property, didn't even have writing etc. It is barely more than a (slightly intolerant) dogwhistle, a "look at me, I like flubber" if you like.
The same actually applies to the terms "forward" or "backward"; we are steeped in a belief that originated in the zeitgeist of intellectual Europe in the early 1800s (Comte et al) that society always moves forward, i.e. to a better place than before. It was supposed to be a secular set of objective values applied to the historical progression of epochs, but it has turned out to be as arbitrary as any other that touts as superior and eternal the finicky values of their own specific time and place. When I use the term it mostly just represents the arrow of time, with no further valuation.
Many people feel like this kind of reasoning will cause them to lose their moorings, but it is really the only viable antidote to the ubiquitous self-righteousness that is ultimately putting us all at risk. It is not like nihilism, because it leads to the conclusion that it is better to have an understanding for, and come to terms with other people, be they from times gone by, with beliefs that may seem strange, or from the other side of the globe.
Love is faith. How else do you explain making yourself totally vulnerable to another human for no reason other than the possibility that they will be nice to you for life, rather than eventually changing as humans tend to do, and despite huge rates of divorce and cheating in our society? Either you have faith in the one you love, or you are a hard rationalist that sees its a losing bet
I think you're just attacking faith because you think it's a purely religious concept and you feel your smarter than the religious. But it really isn't a purely religious concept. Anyone who's had faith a friend would let them down ought to know that .
Rhe kind of confidence that you have here, the kind that makes you certain a majority of the world are fools for practicing religion-- that's the real thought-terminating cliche. It's the same thing as the religious person who thinks they know everything and can condemn all to hell because they're so certain they're right and everyone who thinks differently is wrong. And it really is a tired cliche
> How else do you explain making yourself totally vulnerable to another human for no reason other than the possibility that they will be nice to you for life …
Our social impulses are the result of several billion years of evolution. The primary reasons are reproduction and survival.
I didn’t invent these ideas by the way. For reference, I would take a look at the fields of Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, etc.
Love is the result of evolution? No, love is a concept from culture. The raw feelings we have are the result of evolution. But as some men live to say, evolution didn't make them monogamous it made them want to be polygamous. It's culture that says you are supposed up love one single person your whole life despite constantly finding others attractive.
Given that religion, especially the Abrahamic faiths(at least for the western and Islamic worlds) were a huge part in getting to the scientifically minded society we have today, I would think it might be an Alien species' way of making us advance ourselves intellectually. Religion is pretty much what forced people to live together peacefully so that science can advance. Go back 100,000 years and humans were still eating each other.
That's a very peculiar definition of rationality... But can't blame you, it's one of those words that modern language successfully tore apart, and most people nowadays equate rationality with logic, creating lots of troubles for themselves in the process.
Science can't answer 'why', only 'how'. I think a science-only-based culture (i.e. post-Enlightenment) respects only how some questions can be answered, those answers that can be known. But science disrespects the importance of questions that can't be answered, that which can't be known.
Religion (a formal model for belief in and worship of what can't be known) can't fill this void, nor can science. But forms of spirituality that adopt less formal organizing principles might -- such as respecting the constructive power of myths and memes that seek to further humane principles, like justice or kindness, to shape a better world.
Deism of the kinds that Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson (or Spinoza?) adopted venture into this space somewhat, in presuming a creator god who serves as a guide for humans to make a better world. But because such models of 'worship' are seldom systematic nor do they specify the regulations people crave to assure compliance (and their final reward), they tend not to attract acolytes, and so are hard to sustain as a ongoing social movement. But such models of belief (and respect) may be needed nonetheless.
I believe the real “why” can be fully explained by the needs and constraints of human psychology, which in turn is informed by its biological and socio-cultural evolution. Science is the correct tool to arrive at the real answers here. Whether most people can deal with those answers is a different matter. One aspect of those answers being that meaning and meaningfulness only exist as inner constructions of the mind. The general difficulties that humans have with understanding and accepting the inner workings of their minds are hard to resolve. Arguably it’s of evolutionary benefit to have a counterfactual model of one’s own mind and of the metaphysical and spiritual nature of reality.
BTW I’m not disagreeing on the fact that some things are necessarily unknowable, but mostly in the sense of the incompleteness theorems and other inherent limitations of information processing and the physical laws of nature.
How does science fill the void that has caused so many people to be totally detached from society-- having no friends, no spouse, the only reasons to leave the house are work and groceries. There are practically epidemic levels of depressed people who feel disconnected from society
The world is full of non-religious people who don't experience this "void," and even more religious people who do. So you should rather be asking why religion has failed to fill it.
That's just.. not true. It's mostly a first world problem, I don't see how it's mostly religious people. The third world still tends to have very strong communities. It's the first world where it's common to have shut ins that don't know how to interact with others because there are few organic channels to socialize with strangers
Citation needed kind of comment. The Void you refer to boils down to meaning. Whether you like it or not, religion is precisely meant to fill that void: religion means re-legare, to bind together in a coherent whole.
"The American Philosophical Association promotes the discipline and profession of philosophy, both within the academy and in the public arena. The APA supports the professional development of philosophers at all levels and works to foster greater understanding and appreciation of the value of philosophical inquiry."
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 93.0 ms ] thread“Spinoza and Kierkegaard are very different thinkers in many ways, but I see them as connected in this resistance to objectified religion. Spinoza’s insistence that religion is a virtue – as you put it, a way of life – resonates with Kierkegaard’s view that religion is a matter of “how” rather than “what.” It is a matter of how you orient your life; how to relate to yourself, to other people, and to God; how you think and feel and act.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism
Faith is the ultimate thought-terminating cliche. Its malware for the human brain.
The good parts of religion/spirituality are the rich cultural traditions which have been the birthplace for many philosophical ideas.
But the only way for those cultural traditions to continue evolving is to rid themselves of the malware of faith.
Whether a person is optimistic or pessimistic in the face of unknown is a matter of faith. Values/morals, even outside of an organized religion, are still a matter of faith (not that they'll be rewarded, but that they're somehow better, even in situations you'd be advantaged by disregarding them). That there is value in life, in expression, etc, are all matters of faith, as for every bit of rational evidence that there is benefit in them, there is also rational evidence that there are issues in them. The fact philosophers don't end up in the same place indicates there are, at minimum, different axioms over what is valuable or necessary in the first place.
Whether faith happens to also include a concept of god is immaterial; most if not all of us operate under concepts just as immaterial but which nevertheless we believe in.
Lostcolony, I believe you are using a far more nebulous and encompassing definition for the word compared to dqpb who I think operates with a more concrete and narrow definition.
If dnub cares to explicitly call out religion, as a specific subset and distinct from faith, the arguments I'd make are largely the same. I see very little difference in the evidence between "I believe there is a knowable God(s) who would have me be kind", "I believe there is a concept of 'god' that would have me be kind", and "I believe being kind is the 'right' thing to do"; none of them rely on refutable claims.
Maybe what you mean is 'blind faith', i.e., a rejection of evidence contrary to what you want to believe, to which I will again point out is not unique to religion, by pointing to politics, and the quote of our past president "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening", and the millions willing to accept that.
1. When faith is claimed to have a direct physical effect. For example, faith healing in which ones faith conjures divine intervention, or in the Christian Science sense where faith directly alters your physical reality, or in The Secret where faith in having something "attracts" it to you, etc. The malware in this idea is that it corrupts the very concept of evidence. If you try to find evidence that it doesn't work - by having faith and not observing the proposed effects - it's nullified by saying you just didn't have enough faith.
2. When faith exploits our innate social impulses. For example: Jesus died for your sins, how cruel of you to deny him. Or if you don't have faith you will be excluded from the club of Heaven and you will be permanently separated from all your friends and family who were true believers. Or when not having faith alienates you from your existing friends, family, and community. The malware here is that it short-circuits your natural process of observe->think->decide and turns it into observe->consider-social-contract->think->decide. If someone presents you with a good argument for why something is or isn't true, but it violates the social contract of your faith (ensuring your initial impulse is to feel guilt and fear), then you are short-circuited from thinking.
Back to politics, QAnon is an obvious example, but even something as 'comparatively' sane as trickle down economics suffers both of those as well (for the first, "it's not working" - "we just have to cut rich peoples' taxes more! And quit spending so much on social services!"; for the second, "we should tax the rich more and spend it on social services" "What are you, some sort of socialist?! This is -America-, the best goddamn country in the world! Love it or leave it!").
https://academic.logos.com/kierkegaards-leap-of-faith/
Having raised a child, I think the will to explore is natural and innate, and confidence in oneself is developed and reinforced through experience.
Even without these, one doesn’t need God to understand the concept of variation.
That is not the same you might argue, and you'd be right of course. But there are so many overlaps that is certainly motivated to call it similar: We are weaned into a secular disdain for religion - at least in many parts of the world - just as the Inuit are weaned into their food culture. It is not primarily a function of our superior intellect that we look down on religion, it is a function of our age and time. We will eventually abandon our present hubris for something else, just as people under the monotheistic era departed from the previous animistic and polytheistic beliefs.
So what is unhealthy about it? wasn't the monotheistic religions a big step forward that allowed for greater societal cohesion and (in most places) a rule of law? Isn't a secular society a much better place than before, where beliefs are not passed down from above in a unintelligible language and jealously guarded by the elites that profited from the system?
Well the key term is probably "step forward" as opposed to right and wrong. It is not like the Inuits are wrong in their eating habits - but uninformed and biased people might be prone to think so. It is not like the polytheists were wrong, in spite of the persecution they endured. And it is not like we are right in our present thinking either - a step forward in many respects, yes. But we will one day also be ridiculed for our primitive assumptions about reality - by the biased people of the future.
Provided we all survive the present at all, our present and ubiquitous self-righteousness sure looks poised to snuff out whatever future we may dream of.
Huh?
Greece. Rome. Polytheism could accommodate monotheism. Monotheism could not accommodate polytheism or different monotheisms. How is intolerance a step forward?
The same actually applies to the terms "forward" or "backward"; we are steeped in a belief that originated in the zeitgeist of intellectual Europe in the early 1800s (Comte et al) that society always moves forward, i.e. to a better place than before. It was supposed to be a secular set of objective values applied to the historical progression of epochs, but it has turned out to be as arbitrary as any other that touts as superior and eternal the finicky values of their own specific time and place. When I use the term it mostly just represents the arrow of time, with no further valuation.
Many people feel like this kind of reasoning will cause them to lose their moorings, but it is really the only viable antidote to the ubiquitous self-righteousness that is ultimately putting us all at risk. It is not like nihilism, because it leads to the conclusion that it is better to have an understanding for, and come to terms with other people, be they from times gone by, with beliefs that may seem strange, or from the other side of the globe.
Both monotheistic and polytheistic.
> … didn't even have writing…
Greece. Rome.
> When I use the term ["forward"] it mostly just represents the arrow of time, with no further valuation.
Except that the term you used was "a big step forward" which certainly suggests more than "the arrow of time".
I think you're just attacking faith because you think it's a purely religious concept and you feel your smarter than the religious. But it really isn't a purely religious concept. Anyone who's had faith a friend would let them down ought to know that .
Rhe kind of confidence that you have here, the kind that makes you certain a majority of the world are fools for practicing religion-- that's the real thought-terminating cliche. It's the same thing as the religious person who thinks they know everything and can condemn all to hell because they're so certain they're right and everyone who thinks differently is wrong. And it really is a tired cliche
Our social impulses are the result of several billion years of evolution. The primary reasons are reproduction and survival.
I didn’t invent these ideas by the way. For reference, I would take a look at the fields of Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, etc.
My pet theory is that an alien species planted religion in humans as a KPI to determine when we’re rational enough to be worth interacting with.
What void? We have the science that you can explore to fill the "unknown/void".
Religion (a formal model for belief in and worship of what can't be known) can't fill this void, nor can science. But forms of spirituality that adopt less formal organizing principles might -- such as respecting the constructive power of myths and memes that seek to further humane principles, like justice or kindness, to shape a better world.
Deism of the kinds that Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson (or Spinoza?) adopted venture into this space somewhat, in presuming a creator god who serves as a guide for humans to make a better world. But because such models of 'worship' are seldom systematic nor do they specify the regulations people crave to assure compliance (and their final reward), they tend not to attract acolytes, and so are hard to sustain as a ongoing social movement. But such models of belief (and respect) may be needed nonetheless.
BTW I’m not disagreeing on the fact that some things are necessarily unknowable, but mostly in the sense of the incompleteness theorems and other inherent limitations of information processing and the physical laws of nature.