CPHL709 Religion, Science

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CPHL709 Religion, Science Philosophy

• Naturalistic Explanations of Religion

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• A naturalistic explanation of religion (NES)
  explains religious phenomena (experiences,
  beliefs, practices, institutions, etc.)
  exclusively by reference to natural phenomena.
• Natural here is meant in the broad (and
  admittedly vague) sense to include phenomena of
  the social sciences, e.g. psychological,
  anthropological, even political phenomena

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• Examples
• Mystical experiences are caused by
  micro-seizures in the temporal lobe.
• People believe in reincarnation because it is
  comforting to believe that we have more than one
  life to live.
• Prayer is essentially a way of clarifying,
  expressing and affirming our highest intentions
  and ideals.
• The church's primary function is to provide an
  illusion of moral
• legitimacy to the state.
• Public religious rituals are an evolutionary
  adaptation that increases group cohesion in our
  complex social species.

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• Note that none of these explanations explicitly
  rules out the alternative religious explanation
  being true these are not like deductive
  arguments against religious belief.
• But one might suppose that if we can satisfyingly
  explain religion without recourse to belief in
  the supernatural, then there is little left to
  recommend belief in the supernatural.

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• P1. We can satisfyingly explain religious
  phenomena without reference to supernatural
  entities.
• P2. We should believe in the supernatural only if
  we cannot satisfyingly explain religious
  phenomena without reference to supernatural
  entities.
• ___________
• C1. We ought not to believe in supernatural
  entities.

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• What is a satisfying explanation?
• 1. Complete accounts for all of the relevant
  phenomena is anomaly-free
• 2. Economical uses as few assumptions or
  explanatory principles as possible
• The axiom that the simpler explanation should be
  preferred over the more complicated one, so long
  as they are otherwise equal, is often called the
  principle of parsimony or Ockhams razor
• 3. Commensurable fits with our
  well-established beliefs minimally, is at least
  consistent with our well-established beliefs

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• Here is an account of an explanation of
  questionable economy
• In The Eichmann Memoirs, Eichmann claimed to
  have heard from Himmler that Hitler had given a
  verbal order authorizing the Holocaust, thereby
  contradicting Irving's claim in Hitlers War that
  Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Irving's
  response to the claim that Hitler ordered the
  Holocaust in The Eichmann Memoirs was to claim
  that Eichmann wrote his memoirs in 1956 at the
  time of the Suez War, and was fearful that Cairo,
  Egypt might fall to Israel. Irving's reasoning is
  that if Cairo was taken by the Israeli Defence
  Forces, then the Israelis might discover the
  "rat-line", as undercover smuggling networks for
  Nazis were known, that had allowed Eichmann to
  escape to Argentina, and that therefore Eichmann
  had written his memoirs as a potential defense in
  the event of being captured by the Israelis. In
  this way, Irving argued that The Eichmann Memoirs
  were genuine but that the claim that Hitler
  ordered the Holocaust was false only made to
  reduce Eichmann's responsibility for the
  Holocaust.
• - From Wikipedia article on David Irving

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• Feuerbachs Explanation of Religion
• Feuerbach develops his NER over two separate
  works The Essence of Christianity (1841), and
  Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851).
• Feuerbachs main thesis in EC is that God is a
  thoroughly human creation, that man made God, not
  God man.
• Our concept of God - of a being who is
  infinitely loving, wise, and powerful - is
  actually a disguised, indirect description of an
  idealized human nature.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• Thus our concept of God is essentially
  anthropomorphic, (of human form), according to
  Feuerbach.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• Even the divine beings of major contemporary
  religions are simply reflections of human nature,
  says F, though their adherents do not recognize
  this as clearly as they do of earlier religions,
  which they condemn as idolatrous.
• F emphasizes that religious believers are not
  explicitly aware that God is simply a reflection
  of themselves it is essential to religion that
  its adherents are unaware of its ultimate object.
• He thus calls religion the childlike condition
  of humanity, our naïve first naïve attempt at
  contemplation of our own nature.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• F notes that many religious adherents will object
  that though they may tend to conceptualize their
  God in anthropomorphic terms, in fact God is
  beyond all such conceptualizations.
• F rebuts this objection with the accusation that
  someone who refuses to attach any definite
  attributes to their God is, in practice if not
  theory, an atheist.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• It is in his later work, Lectures on the Essence
  of Religion (1851), that F provides us with an
  explanation of why we create Gods.
• Fs primary claim in the Lectures is that the
  ultimate psychological cause of religion is human
  egoism, or our overpowering desire for happiness.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• Of all religious phenomena, F takes prayer to be
  the most revealing of his theory F calls prayer
  nothing but a humble command, a command in
  religious form. 203
• Prayer is the fundamental expression of the
  primary aim of religion, which is our own
  fulfillment.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• F's explanation of religion has been very
  influential. For example, the theory of religion
  advanced by Freud in The Future of An Illusion is
  very similar to F's.
• Freud argues that belief in God involves the
  projection specifically of the Father-image,
  and connects it explicitly to developmental
  psychology

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• Objections to Feuerbach?
• Fs projection theory, as it is sometimes called,
  gives us a relatively economical explanation of
  religion, since he traces religion back (in LER)
  to one simple psychological process nature
  frustrates our desire for happiness, so we come
  to believe in a supernatural realm where our
  desires are fulfilled.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• Fs theory is also seems commensurable with
  common plausible beliefs about human nature.
• For example, we commonly accept that desires can
  have a profound influence upon the process of
  belief-formation. When we badly want something
  to be true, we often come to believe it is true.

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• Feuerbach, EC LER
• The completeness of Fs theory is not so clear.
  Are there anomolous religious phenomena which Fs
  theory doesnt well account for?
• For example, what would F say about people who
  not only believe in God, but have had mystical,
  quasi-perceptual experiences of God? Is the
  desire for happiness strong enough to
  facilitate these?
• What about people who believe that God exists but
  would rather that God doesnt exist? (Perhaps
  this is a trivial counter-example.)
• What about people who maintain religious beliefs
  because they are convinced by purely rational
  considerations, e.g. traditional proofs of Gods
  existence?

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• Pascal Boyer names four influential types of
  explanation of religion
• Intellectual Scenarios Religion provides
  explanations
• Emotive Scenarios Religion provides comfort
• Social Scenarios Religion provides social
  cohesion
• The Sleep of Reason Religion is a fundamental
  mental error
• Boyer offers objections to each of these
  explanations.

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• A1. Intellectual Scenarios
• Religion arises gradually in response to our
  persistent, fundamental desire to explain events
  and processes.
• Boyer lists four common sub-types of this theory
  of religion
• People created religion to explain puzzling
  natural phenomena.
• People created religion to explain puzzling
  mental phenomena.
• People created religion to explain the origin of
  things.
• People created religion to explain evil and
  suffering.

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• O1 A1. Boyers objects to this interpretation of
  religion as follows
• Many religious explanations of mysteries are so
  weak or regressive that it seems unlikely their
  main purpose is actually to explain things.

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• A2. Emotive Scenarios
• Religion serves some deep emotional need.
• Two versions
• i. Religion make mortality palatable.
• ii. Religion allays anxieties regarding the
• difficulties of life.

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• Boyers objections?
• O1A2. Religion often creates as much anxiety as
  it does comfort
• O2A2 Religious beliefs offer comfort only
  insofar as they are believed. How is it that
  they come to be believed in the first place?
  How would Feuerbach respond to this objection?

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• A3 Social Scenarios
• Religion organizes society.
• Three versions
• i. Religion gives people common beliefs and
  ideals.
• ii. Religion perpetuates a specific social
  order.
• iii. Religion supports morality.

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• Boyers Objections?
• O1A3 We find a core of common moral values across
  many cultures, but great religious variety.
• O2A3 Functionalist explanations simply assume
  that individuals are inclined to produce social
  cohesion. But there must be some benefit to the
  individual for religion to persist.

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• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001)
• A4The Sleep of Reason
• Religion is due to some flaw in mental
  functioning.
• Three versions
• i. People are superstitious and will believe
  anything.
• ii. Religious concepts are irrefutable.
• iii. Refutation is more difficult than belief.

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• O1A4 We are not prone to believe just any
  irrefutable or sensational claims. Why do the
  specifically religious ones persist?

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• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
• Evolutionary Explanations of Religion
• In recent years some people have tried to shed
  light on religion using evolutionary theory.
• David Sloan Wilson, Darwins Cathedral
• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell

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• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
• Wilsons suggestive hypothesis is that a groups
  capacity for religion could give it certain
  advantages over other groups and it thus might
  have spread among our hominid ancestors.
• Dennetts theory doesnt quite go this route.
  For one, he leaves open the possibility that
  evolved aspects of religions are harmful to us,
  parasitically taking advantage of some of our
  psychological propensities.

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• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
• Dennett makes use of the concept meme. The term
  was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene
  (1976).
• Meme a meme is the cultural version of a gene,
  a unit of information that can replicate (more or
  less successfully) and spread through
  communication from mind to mind, and thereby
  contribute to cultural evolution.
• The spread of memes, like genes, is driven by
  variation and selection

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• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
• Susan Blackmores example of a meme (a
  memeplex, more specifically)
• A typical one shouts Warning, Warning, news
  just in from IBM (or Bill Gates or ) terrible
  virus, warn all your friends immediately that if
  they open a mail called bla bla their hard disk
  will be wiped clean.
• The structure of this memeplex
• C-TaP
• i.e. a copy me instruction backed up by
  Threats and Promises.

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• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell
• Bonus Assignment
• In a total of 200 words or less, answer the
  following two questions
• What is a HADD? What aspects of religion does it
  help to explain, and how?
• What is an exopsychic decision procedure? What
  aspects of religion does it help to explain, and
  how?
• Submit correct, coherent answers to
  pbali_at_ryerson.ca by July 23, and I will add 2
  marks to your final course mark.
• The subject line of your email should read
  CPHL709 Bonus Assignment.

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• William Alston, The Experiential Basis of
  Theism
• Main Conclusion
• Certain types of quasi-perceptual experiences
  can give an individual good reason to believe in
  God.
• Key Terms
• doxastic practice
• reliability
• basic doxastic practice
• sense perception

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• Alston, The Experiential Basis of Theism
• Natural Theology
• vs.
• experience of God

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• Alston, The Experiential Basis of
  Theism
• I should say a word about the scope of my term
  "theistic experience." I mean it to range over
  all experiences that are taken by the experiencer
  to be an awareness of God (where God is thought
  of theistically). I impose no restrictions on its
  phenomenal quality. It could be a rapturous loss
  of conscious self-identity in the mystical unity
  with God it could involve "visions and voices"
  it could be an awareness of God through the
  experience of nature, the words of the Bible, or
  the interaction with other persons it could be a
  background sense of the presence of God,
  sustaining one in one's ongoing activities. Thus
  the category is demarcated by what cognitive
  significance the subject takes it to have, rather
  than by any distinctive phenomenal feel.

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• Alston, The Experiential Basis of Theism
• Alston defends theistic experience against the
  charge that it is circular
• Where we are dealing with what we might call a
  basic practice, one that constitutes our basic or
  most direct cognitive access to a subject matter,
  it is not to be expected that we can show it to
  be rational or irrational in a non-circular way,
  by using only the output of other practices.The
  most important consideration in deciding on the
  rationality of a doxastic practice is its
  reliability, the extent to which it can be
  depended on to yield true rather than false
  beliefs. But if the practice in question, P, is
  our basic access to its subject matter, we will
  have no independent way of comparing P's
  deliverance with the real facts of the matter, so
  as to determine the accuracy of P's deliverance.

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• Alston, The Experiential Basis of Theism
• Epistemic Imperialism
• Alston concludes that we must use internal
  criteria to confirm basic doxastic practices.
• But doesnt theistic experience fall short of
  sense-perception in this regard? Sense
  perception is intersubjectively confirmable,
  repeatable, consistent, etc.
• Alston agrees, but says that this is to be
  expected of sense-perception, because of the
  nature of the object that it tracks

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• Alston, The Experiential Basis of Theism
• If the subject matter is maximally stable, as
  in mathematics, then always yielding the same
  beliefs about the same objects is an indication
  of reliability but if the subject matter is in
  constant flux that same feature would rather
  betoken unreliability. If the subject matter is
  inorganic nature, the formation of beliefs
  concerning intelligible communications from the
  objects would indicate unreliability, but not if
  the subject matter is persons. What features
  indicate reliability depends on what features are
  such that they could be expected to be present if
  the practice yields mostly truths, given the
  nature of the subject matter and our relation to
  it.

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• Alston, The Experiential Basis of Theism
• Alston completes his defence by arguing that
  because of Gods massive transcendence, we
  shouldnt expect theistic perception to be as
  stable as sense perception

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• Evan Fales, Scientific Explanations of
  Mystical Experiences
• Evan Fales scientific explanation of mystical
  (a.k.a. ecstatic) experiences combines two
  approaches
• 1. A socio-political explanation, which draws
  heavily from the work of social anthropologist
  I.M. Lewis and
• 2. A neurological explanation which, Fales
  admits, is in its early stages

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• Fales, Scientific Explanations
• 1. Socio-political explanation
• I.M. Lewis, in his book Ecstatic Religion, argues
  that mystical experiences are essentially a
  strategy used by individuals for gaining
  increased access to social and political power.
• This strategy is employed primarily by two types
  of individuals
• (i) members of marginalized groups
• (ii) aspirants to high or central status

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• Fales, Scientific Explanations
• Fales argues that Lewiss theory works strikingly
  well for a variety of primitive societies, but
  perhaps cant (without modification) account for
  the complex distribution of ecstatic experiences
  that we find in modern industrial societies.
• If we integrate Lewiss theory with a
  neurological account, we get a more complete
  explanation of mystical experience, says Fales

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• Fales, Scientific Explanations
• 2. Neurological explanation
• There seems to be a correlation between mystical
  experience and activity and certain parts of the
  brain
• Epileptics in the 1950s reported having mystical
  experiences when parts of their brain were
  electrically stimulated during surgical treatment
• Subsequent study has shown that mystical
  experiences can be initiated by microseizures in
  the temporal lobes of the brain
• The temporal lobe and its associated neural
  structures (hippocampus, amygdala) play an
  important role in integrating cognition and
  emotion, so it is not surprising that seizures
  there would be experienced in ways that could be
  conditioned by the subjects belief system, but
  also have powerful affective components. p.259,
  original pagination

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• Fales, Scientific Explanations
• If individual susceptibility to this neurological
  process is randomly distributed in human
  populations, then this fact might help to explain
  many of the private mystical experiences that
  are not apparently used by their subject for
  socio-political gain.