Religulous: An Unpublishable Review

An Incomplete Review of Bill Maher's Religulous:

I finally saw the Bill Maher movie Religulous over my winter break. I liked the fact that someone challenged the dominant, dogmatic religious position in America more than I liked the movie in particular. Or, maybe, the dogma was better in the abstract than in the concrete.

The first thing to note about the movie is that it is not a traditional documentary. In the traditional documentary, the subjects are allowed to state their positions with an invisible interviewer, perhaps even representing the audience, who asks questions only enough to bring out their views as fully and fairly as possible but which, when properly done, can make the absurdity of their positions clear to all viewers. For many subjects, no one needs to get in a verbal fight with them to show the viewer how wrong, misguided they are, how obviously they are rationalizing obviously irrational beliefs or wrong actions. This is not that approach.

Here Maher takes center stage. It is a documentary about Maher more than it is a documentary by Maher. He debates the other subjects, interrupts them, does not let them complete their trains of thought, shows them errors in reasoning or problems that they must address. These are worthwhile things to do, and, while Maher is an imperfect representative of reason (who isn't?), it is good for all of us that someone attempted to challenge these orthodoxies in such a public way.

Having written that last sentence, I am tempted to retract it. Is Maher really challenging orthodoxy? Most of the people he talks to are fringe weirdos. He ridicules Biblical literalism, Scientology, and various cult-like Christian-like individuals. The only people who come of well in the documentary are actually mainstream Catholic figures who reject the simple-mindedness of their sheep-like followers. So, how could Maher be challenging a dominant orthodoxy? In two ways. First, it is part of our pluralistic, religiously credulous society that people should not be challenged about their religion no matter how absurd it is. We are supposed to let people believe whatever they want and praise them quietly for their piety and faith. So when Maher challenges these people, he is implicitly urging that everyone, religious and irreligious, submit religions to critical scrutiny. Second, and this relates to the first, Maher (explicitly?) points out that the basic justifications for the more sophisticated religious views are no better justified, are based on no more than, the views of the crazies. The dreadful secret at the heart of mainstream religion, and the secret that protects the most absurdly religious, is that there is fundamentally no better reason to believe in the God of the Episcopalians than there is to believe in the God of the Pentecostals. Once one criticizes the fundamentalists, one must consider the possibility of criticizing others, and it is obvious that the mainstream religions cannot withstand scrutiny either. Ironically, fundamentalists, convinced of their divinely-inspired wisdom rarely miss an opportunity to attack their more pluralistic brethren. The worst, as they might say, are filled with righteous indignation.

(Note, mainstream religions tend not to make the same outlandish empirical claims as the fundamentalists, but they do so primarily by refusing to make empirical statements of any kind. They aren't outright falsified by reality because they say nothing about reality at all. Do religions have some other purpose or cover some other area (Gould's NOMA view)? Possibly, but since religion is not about morality or meaning, it's hard to see what it could be other than a particularly poor form of psychotherapy.)

However, as I said, Maher is a flawed representative of skepticism or the general non-religious movement in America. He makes inappropriate jokes (e.g. jokes about Jewish stinginess), lacks ready answers for obviously flawed arguments, relies on standard problems (that may perhaps not be appropriate for that particular interviewee), and he tends to pursue his own agenda or seek only to justify his own prejudices in interviews that could otherwise be interesting and informative. Several of the interviewees are brought up short by Maher's somewhat inappropriate, potentially racist humor. At any rate, some of the humor is jarring.

One scene is his odd dialogue with the guy playing Jesus in a Biblical Literalist theme park. Why is this person being interviewed? What special insight or knowledge does the Jesus-actor have? I don't know, but I suspect the reason he is in the movie is more that he (1) played well on film and (2) he was willing to talk to Maher. At any rate, one of "Jesus'" odd claims is his resolution of the problem with the holy trinity. He says that God/Jesus/Holy spirit are like three phases of matter: solid, liquid, gas (who knows what the analogue to plasma is?). Maher later says that this is transparently bullshit, which it is, but he does not explain why and he admits to being befuddled in the debate itself. So, why is it bullshit? Traditional Christian doctrine is that these are three separate, distinct beings which are nonetheless also one being. The analogy to phases of the same matter obviously fails because that involves one thing in three different states. Maybe the best thing is to ditch the crazy idea that God/Jesus/Holy spirit are both 1 distinct thing and three distinct things, but this analogy doesn't help elucidate such an idea. It would have been better if Maher had been able to call "Jesus" on this bullshit, but we don't get to see what would have been the response.

The biggest single flaw with the movie was Maher's interview with the neuroscientist who studied neural correlates of religious belief. Here Maher's prejudices are most obviously on view. He insists that religious belief is a kind of mental illness, and no matter how his interlocutor attempts to qualify such a claim or actually provide new or useful information, Maher refuses to be derailed and takes the neuroscientist to be confirming his view.

Is religious belief a mental illness? I don't know. It's not at all clear what it is for something to be a mental illness. But even so, we learn little about the nature of religious belief or its neural concomitants. (I think this is the subject for another post.)

This raises the final question. What is the purpose of the movie? Maher hints at it at one point. He says that non-believers are an enormous potential market (or constituency) that no one properly represents. And while I think Maher is perfectly sincere in his skepticism about religion, the purpose of this movie is not to convince his fundamentalist opponents (who clearly will not be moved by whatever evidence he presents) or to convince mainstream believers to question their own beliefs (since, to some extent, he lets them off the hook--by portraying them more sympathetically). He may want to get the moderates to note the bedfellows they have found in the fundamentalist kooks who benefit from our lack of a critical attitude. However, the target audience is non-believers. Maher wants us to see him do battle with the foolish fundamentalists and reinforce our own feelings of superiority over them. It's probably both a sincere belief and a savvy pose for Maher. The only people who are likely to enjoy this movie are the people who are predisposed to ridicule the fundamentalist cretins and whatever mainstream enablers they find. It's not necessary a bad thing to do. Showing the opposition as clearly as you can, and showing how they fail to meet one's reasonable standards of belief is worthwhile. But it's also not the best thing one could do either.

Inciting Violence and Arizona Shootings

Following the grand old internet tradition, a shorter Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle:

Politely criticizing me for inciting violence against others is the real incitement of violence.

Or:

Democrats should cease insisting I ritually ingest the blood of Christian children for my unholy ends. It's really Jesus' blood.

Or:

Don't point fingers. Use second amendment pointing instead.

Seriously, by their own standard, Palin and Angle have just incited violence against everyone who criticized them. No one could, therefore, criticize anyone for inciting violence without also inciting violence.

The actual standard is, of course, that nothing Republicans say incites violence, and everything Democrats say incites violence. That's why Republicans (Right-wingers, anyway) so often have to act on their own to defend themselves.

Paul Thaggard's The Brain and the Meaning of Life

An Unpublishable Book Review: Paul Thaggard's The Brain and the Meaning of Life
I've recently read an interesting book by Paul Thaggard, "The Brain and the Meaning of Life". Since I'm a philosopher of mind and have taught about the meaning of life, it seemed a natural book to read. I thought it might be about how to make room in a physical world for meaning. However, it is not really that book. Instead, it is an attempt to construct a scientifically informed theory responding to great philosophical questions about freedom, morality, and meaning presented to a general audience. It feels unfair to criticize a general interest book for failing to come fully to terms with all the problems it raises. It is, in addition, a fairly reasonable account of how we can live in an ethical and meaningful way without belief in God, freedom or an immaterial soul. I do not have substantive criticisms of his arguments for the value of science, the denial of the existence of God and the soul, or (mostly) his views on free will. That said, I have serious reservations about the book.

First, however, I'll describe Thaggard's book a little more.

The work is an anti-philosophical work of philosophy. Thaggard works in the tradition of C.S. Peirce, who argued that the metaphysical intuitions of his contemporaries were just disguised prejudices of their culture, no better than an appeal to popularity. Thaggard is particularly skeptical of the thought experiments one often finds in the professional literature, especially on topics such as personal identity or free will and determinism. I think there is reason to be skeptical of our intuitions, but it's also not clear what else we have to go on for claims about morality and meaning.

Indeed, given Thaggard's distrust of philosophical and a priori intuitions, it's not clear how he can justify the arguments in his own work. His goal is to rely only on empirical evidence, but it's not obvious how empirical evidence is to apply to most or all of his questions. For example, Thaggard relies on surveys of subjective well-being to argue that money (beyond a certain minimum) is not necessary for a meaningful life. The features he does find in the literature are rewarding work, love and play, which appeal to basic human needs. It's not entirely clear what makes these qualify as needs since one can survive without at least some of them. He relies on an account of human needs found in the literature on psychology, but classification of these goods as needs does not have any empirical justification (at least, I don't recall him giving any.)

On the other hand, Thaggard argues that having children contributes to the meaning of life. Yet, it turns out that having children does not contribute to subjective judgments of one's own happiness or well-being. Thus, when it comes to the value of children for the meaning of life, we must abandon the empirical evidence that links meaning to subjective judgments of well-being. I suspect most will agree with Thaggard that happiness (understood subjectively) is not the same as meaning. We may even agree that children do contribute to the meaning of life despite the lack of an effect on subjective judgments of happiness. The difficulty, however, is that Thaggard offers no concrete evidence to take children to be an exception to the empirical evidence he uses in his other claims about meaning. Thaggard, instead, appears to rely on our popular intuitions about meaning. This appears to be exactly the kind of intuitive, a priori reasoning that Thaggard pretends to reject.

Thaggard must realize that one cannot draw normative conclusions (about the meaning of life and morality of actions) from descriptive phenomena (such as subjective judgments of happiness), but he offers nothing in the way of a method to replace the one that he claims to reject and indeed appears to rely on that very method himself. I would be much happier with a book that offered some reason to accept these intuitive judgments about normativity even if they might be less reliable than conclusions drawn from scientific evidence.

Thaggard's rejection of a priori intuitions and reasoning is, in fact, much stronger than one finds in even most hardened empiricists. He rejects claims that mathematics and logic can provide any true knowledge. At least Thaggard considers the case and gives reasons to deny that even mathematics can give real knowledge of something beyond our own minds. Thaggard's reason to reject a priori knowledge of even mathematics is that some people (in particular, postmodernists) have rejected even the most apparently simple and undeniable a priori claims such as the law of non-contradiction. If, he says, people can believe that two logically contradictory claims can both be true, then there is literally nothing that everyone accepts as logically and necessarily true. Thus, there are no universal, a priori, logical truths.

This is peculiar reasoning. First, relying on what postmodernists say about their beliefs is unreliable. Jacques Derrida, for example, may claim that the law of non-contradiction is not true, but that may be (and probably is) just for the fame that comes from denying something that everyone knows to be true. There are significant social rewards for contrarianism, and it's more likely that he's saying something that he doesn't believe than that he really believes.

Nonetheless, people may believe all manner of crazy things, so it's possible that some people really do reject the law of non-contradiction (just as many have attempted to believe in the holy trinity). The problem with Thaggard's reasoning is that he demands that everyone believe something in order for it to count as a priori knowable. He even comments that we can learn about mathematics by studying human psychology. But these are just outright wrong-headed claims. This is simple psychologism. Mathematics and logic are not about what people believe. More people accept affirming the consequent as valid than accept modus tollens. Should we revise our logic texts to reflect that? In fact, I doubt more than a single percent of the population as a whole could understand, let alone properly apply, the inference patterns of a standard symbolic logic text. But we should not delete them from the curriculum, or take them to involve invalid reasoning, for that. The point is that when these rules of inference or logical claims are properly understood, using truth tables, for example, to show why they are in fact valid or invalid, then their validity or truth is undeniable by a rational being. Yes, my reasoning is shot through with assumptions about normativity and abstraction, but the alternative is nothing short of absurd.

Consider the possibility that logic is about what people believe. For one thing, since people sometimes believe contradictory things, we have no reason to reject contradictions as false. How, then, are we ever to prove anything if, despite our most cogent proof, it is still perfectly acceptable to deny the claim that we have just accepted?

If a priori truths are determined by what everyone believes, then if everyone believes that a priori truths are not determined by what everyone believes, then they are not in fact determined by what everyone believes. (Thaggard may have the out that he at least does believe they are based on psychology, and anyway, the fact that his claim is contradictory is not great problem.) If this is Thaggard's standard, then his entire work is a waste of time since people could perfectly reasonably accept the empirical evidence for his conclusions and at the same time believe the exact opposite since there is no objective logic proving that this is an invalid inference. (In fact, that's how many ordinary readers might respond to his work: "I don't see what's wrong with his reasoning, but I reject it anyway." One hopes that Thaggard would not find this an adequate reason to reject his work. So, why accept a theory of a priori knowledge that allows for it?)

Am I being unfair to Thaggard? Maybe. He does claim that mathematics is a kind of fictional discourse, and one can make true or false claims about fiction even if nothing in reality corresponds to them. Does fictionalizing mathematics resolve these problems? I don't think so. For one thing, we have no clear understanding of how truth works in fiction. You cannot explain how mathematics can be true by relying on another field in which truths are not understood. You cannot solve a mystery (truth of claims in mathematics) with another mystery (truth claims in fiction).

But suppose we understood fictional discourse. That still would not resolve the problem. Fiction is essentially arbitrary. The color of Harry Potter's eyes is chosen by J.K.Rowling; there is no reason or justification for her choices, and there need not be one. I'm sure that Thaggard would say that the basic laws of logic, valid inference patterns etc. could not be justified either and so would be equally arbitrary. It is, in fact, hard to see what justification one can offer for modus ponens (besides looking at the truth table which, no doubt, are a lot less obvious than is modus ponens itself and, indeed, might even rely on it to be understood). Nonetheless, it logically follows that if Harry Potter's eyes are entirely blue all over all the time, then they cannot also be entirely brown all over all the time. Why does this follow? Is this also an arbitrary choice made by Rowling? No, she probably would never have thought any such thing. They are not brown because making them blue entails that they are not brown. Similarly, she did not also have to think that they are not green, not red and not tuning forks. Logic still must hold for fiction; logic is a basic underpinning of the truths in fiction and cannot be just another arbitrary system on a par with it.

The self-refutation argument is probably the best way to see this. If logic is just an arbitrary system, determined by a set of people, call it the "math/logic community", which defines those rules, then suppose the community believed that those rules were universally applicable with a force beyond simple psychology. (They need not actually have said this; it must just be possible.) Then, if mathematical/logical statements are true just in case they are accepted by the community, then mathematical/logical statements are true universally, not just for those in the linguistic community. If they are true, they must be universally true.

In reply, surely, one must say that these are no universal a priori, logical truths, only truths relative to a community. But what is the justification for this? Is this true because it has been accepted in a community? (Actually, relativism has rarely been accepted by any group.) Or is it universally true, applying even to the logicians who reject it? If so, then Thaggard has contradicted himself, claiming there are no universal, a priori truths, while offering a universal a priori truth (and if this claim is a posteriori, I'd love to know what his evidence is). If not, then the universalist's claim takes precedence over the relativist's claim. The relativist says: there are only relative truths. Realist says: Realism is universally true for me, and therefore it is universally true and so true for you as well.

These major reservations aside about his problems with having a consistent method for his reasoning and his absurd rejection of all a priori knowledge, Thaggard does have some reasonable thoughts to offer about morality and meaning. Some of it misses the point (he talks about how moral sensibility develops in humans when he raises the question of what justifies moral claims or justifies us in being moral), and he does not properly justify his theory of meaning (given his rejection but continued use of a priori reasoning). Still, general readers would come away with a better way of thinking about themselves, their lives and how to live them than they would have if they continued in their traditional religious beliefs.