Browsing the New York Times website, I ran across the blog of Stanley Fish. Fish, if you’ve never heard of him (lucky you), is an academic star. He is an English professor specializing in deconstruction. In other words, he is not interested in truth; he is only interested in being right by proving that nothing is true.
The blog posts which caught my eye were a series describing Fish’s analysis of three recent books on atheism. Those of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchen. Sparing you the arguments, Fish concludes in his first post, The Three Atheists, that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchen are not contributing anything new. Unfortunately, he does not come to this conclusion by examining the what the books say, but only by applying some of the key principles of the books to religious arguments that he knows have already been made within the context of religion and then assuming he knows how the authors would respond. This is a neat trick that allows him to suggest that there is nothing new in the books without actually engaging in the arguments the books make.
In his second piece, Atheism and Evidence, Fish attempts to demonstrate that science has no grounds for examining religion, nor does religion have grounds for examining science. He performs this trick by blurring the lines between faith and reason; suggesting that both science and religion are based in faith and noting that religion also strives to sustain itself through reason.
In drawing that conclusion, Fish touches on a subject that has been of long standing interest to me: the phenomenon of morality. Harris and Dawkins both believe that morality is derived from natural selection – there is a genetic basis for our moral codes of conduct. To ridicule this idea that science can stand alone and that morality does not require religion, Fish notes that Harris and Dawkins believe:
It’s just a matter of time before so-called moral phenomena will be brought within the scientific ambit: “There will probably come a time,†Harris declares, “when we achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness, and of ethical judgments themselves, at the level of the brain.†And a bit later, “There is every reason to believe that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief systems in the way that it has in every other science.â€
What gives Harris his confidence? Why does he have “every reason to believe†(a nice turn of phrase)? What are his reasons? What is his evidence?…
Note that Fish pulls a cute rhetorical trick here. He ignores the arguments about morality and genetics. Ignores the fact that there are detailed theories allowing one to predict the extent to which we extend our morality to others in our community. He ignores that these theories also predict non-human altruistic behaviors, which religious theories of morality can not. No, he turns away from behavioral discussions of morality and instead focuses on the area where there are still unknowns: how are these high-level genetic imperatives implemented in the structure of the brain. Where religion says to do good because God says to, and Dawkins says that we do good because our genes (though not necessarily ourselves) are likely to prosper, Fish demands that we tell him how doing good excites certain neurons in the brain to encourage doing good.
Finally, Fish discusses objections raised in his first piece: that scientific theories are falsifiable whereas religions faith is constructed so as not to be. Fish states that systems can only be falsified within the context of the belief system in which they operate. So long as any object under discussion is internally self-consistent, it can not be falsified. Fish goes on to flesh out this argument in his third post.
In Is Religion Man-Made?, Fish describes how God is defined in the context of religion. Noting that God exceeds human understanding and is therefore not a subject for examination. Moreover, says Fish, within the context of religion, God is all-encompassing of creation and how can we examine something of which we are part? It seems to be a hobby of humanity to construct such internally consistent theories which can not be tested. Bishop Berkely constructed one regarding the non-existence of matter which no one believed to be true, but could not dispute the internal logic. Samuel Johnson, kicking a large stone, noted, “I refute it thus.â€
Johnson is essentially asserting that while such theories are impossible to disprove, the ultimate judge of their reality is their tangible existence. It is all well and good to assert a pretty piece of logic as indisputable and therefore true, but that does not make it real. Reality is the physical universe in which we inhabit. God may exist as a philosophical construct because the logic of its existence is internally consistent, but that does not mean that there is such a being in reality. Of course, religions do assert that there is such a being in reality. Most that assert a God, with the exception of the Deists, believe that it plays an active role in the universe, i.e., God can alter the physical. Now Fish may think (or assert – I actually doubt that Fish believes any of this) that the existence of God cannot be tested because he is not tangible or because we exist within God, but that’s just silly. Anything which can affect reality can be tested. For example, there have been numerous studies that demonstrate that double-blind studies of prayer show no improvement in sick patients. Cases of healing occur with roughly the same frequency of spontaneous remission. In short, if miracles reflected in a change in reality are the proof of God, then they fall short. That is not to say that a belief in God may not change people. That is not to say that praying will not help you to come to grips with tragedy; only that you would be hard pressed to attribute these to a real, tangible God as opposed to an abstract, conceptual God.
Coming back around to the start of this post, I suppose that I should really just learn not to read deconstructionists. On the other hand, I did comply with the burden placed on me from the title of Fish’s blog, I did “Think Againâ€Â – I just happened to think that Fish is full of it. 🙂
I was an undergrad at Duke when there was some big uproar among my group of friends with Dr. Fish. I am very disturbed to see that (without actually having read his posts that you linked yet) I seem to be agreeing with some of his points.
I don’t really see anything wrong with your arguments – what you are arguing seems to me quite sound and well thought through. If I haven’t had my own personal set of experiences, I would be in total agreement with you.
I think I first lost my “faith” in science is when I first worked for a lab that was falsifying data for an Alzheimer’s study. I was just a little recent college grad newbie lab rat, what did I know? But I got out of there as quickly as possible. And I’ve never trusted scientific research in the same way since. There are still human beings involved.
Then, as I got older, I started to experience an odd sort of synchronicity in my life. I’m not sure whether I mean that in a Jungian sense. But the coincidences which occurred were more prevalent and significant than I could dismiss.
But all of this is very subjective, personal, and not easy to explain – and certainly not provable in any way. I think that’s the point of (what to me eventually became) religious faith – there is no way to prove it. To me that also says there is no way to discount it. Personally, I agree that all of these things, the coincidences, the feeling of synchronicity, the path that led me to become a religious person, yes, can probably all be explained if we understood how the brain works. But this is as moot an argument to me as the fact of evolution. It is simply, in my mind, how God works, and they can coexist with no conflict.
Not that Dr. Fish was trying to say any of this. It seems to me that he takes a Socratic line on these things – argument for argument’s sake. But I thought I’d pipe up with my point of view, which may not be strictly rational, but is at least another way to look at this. 🙂
– etselec
Comment by etselec — July 8, 2007 @ 8:38 am
P.S. It occurs to me that this is a very NT / NF discussion. 😉
Comment by etselec — July 8, 2007 @ 9:23 am
etselec,
You’re right, this is a very NF / NT discussion. If we’re not careful, an ‘S’ will show up and tell us to be practical 🙂
Reading back through the post, I think that it is a bit sloppy. On the one hand, I was commenting on Stanley Fish’s anti-philosophy (if philosophy is the love of truth and Fish denies there is any truth…) and how it irritates me. I was also writing a bit about arguments for a belief in God – none of which are terribly compelling to me, which leaves faith. Faith is not an easy thing for us NTs 🙂
A few comments on your comments. First, I wouldn’t worry about agreeing with Fish. Since he largely argues to knock down the underpinnings of an idea, its easy to cheer him on when he targets those that you don’t agree with. But I agree, he really take any positive positions on anything, so you never know when he’ll turn his deconstruction on the ideals that you hold true.
Second, I can understand being disillusioned with science after being exposed to a group that was falsifying data. That said, I don’t think that a group of scientists falsifying data disproves the truth of a reality rooted in the understandable any more than molesting priests can disprove the existence of God. That people don’t live up to the standards set by their profession in no means undermines the precepts which established that profession.
Third, speaking as an NT, anecdotes are not data. At most they are a few data points. The mind (human and non-human) seems to have a great capacity to find trends and relevance where none exists (the face in Mars, Jesus in a pancake, etc.). Beyond that, it’s an enormous universe and event if we require a confidence level of 99%, we’ll see a lot of things that are not true appear to be true.
If we really wanted to test the significance of God, we could select a thousand random people and categorize both their faith and their experiences. We could then see if those experiences differed based on their faith. This removes the element of mistaken correlation that we all have.
Finally, I’m not saying any of this to dispute, belittle or deny your faith. My own experience has been that the belief in God can have an enormous effect on people’s lives. But the effect is on their attitudes, not their circumstances. Praying to adjust the former often succeeds and is beneficial. Praying to change the later never does. However, speaking again as a Rational, belief in this kind of God does not actually prove its existence in the tangible reality.
-cec
Comment by cec — July 8, 2007 @ 7:54 pm
Oh, yeah. I never said that my belief proves that there is a God. I think I specifically said that that can’t be proven. And that my reasons for believing aren’t any proof. Nor am I out to convert anyone. But whether or not God exists (which I believe he does) it has definitely altered (and I would say improved) my entire life to have made the kind of brain-shift that religious faith requires. And I’d say that people who choose lives of faith all have a certain similar experience when one chooses to believe something that isn’t provable. You can say that it’s a similar brain pattern that we each experience upon conversion or something, and I have a friend who has done a fair bit of research into that very thing. But I’d suggest that, given the prevalence of various religious faiths, it might be worthwhile to think that perhaps we’ve all got our own subjective evidence for thinking that there’s more to this world than what can strictly be physically perceived.
My favorite metaphor for how I see God and why we can’t understand him is something that I came up with all on my own and then found out that some famous theologian had already thought of it first, damn him. 😉 It came from my observations of keeping fish in an aquarium. It took me a while to figure out how these critters’ brains worked, but I started to figure out that they did know I was out there beyond the glass – particularly the Angel Fish were bright enough to realize it was me out there and follow me when I walked in front of their tanks. They could definitely see me coming with the food canister, and would swim very fast back and forth in excitement. When I cleaned their tank, however, they would get very disturbed and hide behind things and then take a while to calm down once the whole experience was over.
But these fish have zero clue what it is to be human. How could something with so little perceptive ability have the first iota of understanding of what my life is like, what my thoughts are, what I do all day long when I’m not in front of their tank? They can’t – they simply don’t have the capacity.
So, similarly, I’m the fish in the tank and God is the equivalent of the human. I have no idea who or what God is. I get scared of him when maybe i have no need to – he may just be cleaning the tank, as it were. But I can still see him through the glass.
This example may be neither here nor there as far as our discussion goes. But perhaps we just do not have the capacity to say whether there is a God or not. Or explain him if we think there is one. Maybe there’s more to this world than we are able to perceive or explain.
Comment by etselec — July 9, 2007 @ 7:51 am
This may be where we’ve really hit the NT / NF impasse.
My general feeling is that if something can produce a tangible effect in the physical world, then that tangible effect can be measured and, while not proof, is evidence. I think the large (universal) number of cultures having religion is evidence of something, but not necessarily evidence of a God. One can point to similar, historical universals in the human subconscious, such as the belief in fairies or the more recent belief in alien abduction. It’s common enough that it is almost certainly evidence of something in the human mind – possibly something similar to the bit that is overactive in finding patterns and correlations; but it’s not (necessarily) evidence of fairies or UFOs.
I suppose that all of this really is just a long winded way of saying that I’ve never been good at the whole Hebrews 11:1 thing: “Now Faith is The Substance of Things Hoped For, The Evidence of Things Not Seen.” I just can’t wrap my head around that one.
-“thomas” aka cec
Comment by cec — July 9, 2007 @ 9:49 pm