On “Moralistic gods” – at least we're taking them seriously now

Usually when the subject of religion crops up in Nature (the top ranking scientific journal), it’s because some perceived great obscurantist evil has to be exposed. The impression given has been that there is definitely nothing good or intellectually wholesome to be found in religion. At best, it’s for the weak minded. However, recently Nature published the report of a very large study by Purzycki and colleagues (“Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality” 2016, Nature 530:327-330). They conducted an experiment investigating how the beliefs of people in eight different, widely separated, communities about their god/s affected how they viewed anonymous, distant, coreligionists.  Long (and interesting) story short, the more you believe your god knows about your thoughts and motives, and wants you to be nice to fellow believers (even if you don’t know them and they live far away), and the more you believe that he/she/it has power to punish you if you don’t do what he/she/it wants, the more you’ll do what they want. So the effect is that you’re kinder to strangers you have no genetic links with. Simple “selfish gene” accounts struggle to explain why humans have come to live in large socially complex cooperative groups rather than small, selfish, genetically related ones. Religious belief, which simple observation shows is rampant, seems to provides at least one explanation.

There’s lots about the experiment that’s really interesting, and some aspects that seem distinctly odd. It’s not clear to me whether the label “Christian” has much of a meaning in the Biblical sense, at least in Western Europe. It seems merely to name a vaguely connected set of cultures that for a long time have been separated by quite some distance from the person one of whose titles provides the label. It would be churlish to claim this, and not accept that there are devout Muslims who feel the same way about the word “muslim” being applied broad-brush to large swathes of the world. After all, if I claim that your average IRA man planting bombs and shooting policemen in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s can’t in any sense be called a Christian without the word being emptied of usefulness, doesn’t the same logic apply to the “muslims” trying set up their Caliphate in Syria/Iraq? Yet this is portrayed as being about Islam and muslims, rather than power and politics. But that aside, there’s something more interesting about the publishing of this paper.

It’s now apparently intellectually respectable to take religion seriously. Strange as it may seem, this is a change. It used to be that religion was an epiphenomenon to be dismissed, or that it was a primitive intellectual parasite that the advance of science would finally put an end to. Or that it belonged to humanity’s violent adolescence, a passing phase we would collectively grow out of. It turns out that as a minimum, the influence of religion, for good or ill, now seems to be accepted as playing some fundamental roll in the development of complex societies. None of this means that what is actually believed by the religious (and that is probably all of us) is true, or even helpful. It’s just that it is observably deeply ingrained in us all. Indeed that it is probably all encompassing.

Now of course I see all this from a particular perspective. Because it’s just what I would expect if in fact we were all the product of (creatures of) a “moralistic” God, who held us accountable for our actions. A God who had designed us to know Him, and enjoy Him. Even if we denied Him, these facts of our design would not disappear; how could they? They’re just brute facts. The way things are. If we tried to observe the state of things from a standpoint of neutrality as to whether He (or “they”) were real, these features of how we are made, and how this worked itself out in our relationships would still be observed.

These observations neither prove that this God (let’s call Him the living God) exists, nor can they explain Him away (although it won’t be long until at least the later of these is being claimed). But at least now it’s respectable to have a sensible discussion. The reality of  Him having “placed eternity in the heart of man” as I might put it (or actually the writer of Ecclesiastes 3:11), and the large scale effects this has had, and still has, is no longer being denied.

Mellowing with age….?

I was struck by an article in yesterday’s Times (“It’s time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam” p32, 30/1/16) in which Richard Dawkins opined about the decency he detects in the Church of England, the cultural value of Biblical language, feminism, Islam and the Koran, and even about his own death. As an aside, over the years he has been an expert and interesting evolutionary biologist; he’s worth listening to and reading on these topics. He talks with deep knowledge, based on years of skillful practice. He is an authority on such things, although I suppose it’s possible that now (in his 74^th year) he’s a bit out of touch with his specialist field. It’s not my field, so I wouldn’t be able to give an authoritative view. On that other long list of topics, he clearly has opinions that people want to hear (otherwise they wouldn’t send journalists to interview him). I have no doubt that his opinions are sincerely held. He may even have thought about them deeply. But the authority he has in the one realm should not carry over into the others. His views carry the weight of an interesting, articulate, generally well educated amateur, nothing more.

Back to the article. A couple of things in it struck me as particularly interesting. First is the almost wistful way in which he thinks about the Church of England and the Bible (or at least some of its language). These things seem to have some useful role to play in our culture. Is this a mellowing with age? Well, maybe. As he makes equally clear, he still has no time for the God whom the Bible reveals. Presumably he still thinks that both this God, and the morality He would have us follow is pernicious and despicable. Or at least that his reading and interpretation of these are. But can you really recommend the one thing without the other? And if the basic premise of even beautiful language is wrong, can the language really be said to be beautiful? I suppose it might have a beautiful sound. But this of course was the trick of the Sirens, the sound of whose beautiful voices lured innocent sailors to their doom. Given all that Dawkins has said and written about not just the irrationality of religion (particularly that based on the Bible), but its dangers, it’s clearly highly illogical, perhaps even dangerous, to now say that some of it is worth having because it’s “nice”. One can imagine the fulminations of the younger Dawkins against such talk.

The other thing is that is striking is the reason for some of this wistfulness. The problem is that Dawkins fears cuddly Christianity being replaced by fundamentalist Islam. To be fair he probably objects any sort of religious view that is fundamentalist in his terms. Sadly, these days he appears to encounter few Bible-believers who are prepared to stick to their guns – “Christians have grown out of that. They don’t believe every word of the Bible.” He thinks that this is a blip. But as so often happens when one strays outwith their area of expertise, he’s probably missing the point. 

Religion is not an unfortunate accident or diversion from the true path of intellectual progress, it is basic to it. Indeed, all that happens when you deny this, is that you set up another religion in the place of those which you seek to deny. So we have the idol of scientism, or its close cousins rationalism and naturalism. These have all the hallmarks of the religion that they condemn, including creeds, rituals and priesthood. They don’t stand outside the game, they are part of the game. They are not the referees and umpires of the competition between other strange, barbaric, teams, they are on the field of play themselves competing hard. Except that these “isms” (note the distinction here between science and scientism) haven’t actually produced much of worth. No, that’s harsh. They’ve occasionally produced nice words, I’ll grant them that.

The problem is that it was and is the truth of the Bible that produced a society in which science developed and flourished and in which questioning, challenging skepticism (“virtues” in Dawkins’ view) were not just tolerated but encouraged. It was centuries of Christianity which conditioned minds and developed intellectual life to the point where advance was possible beyond a certain point. While one cannot rule out the possibility that a different network of beliefs and truth might have led to the same end, it’s a brute fact of history that we came from where we were, not some other starting point.

So, maybe the eponymous Professor is mellowing. Although I suspect that even old mellow Dawkins bridled when he read the first sentence of the article, in which he was introduced as “the high priest of atheism”.