Pessimistic about Pessin

Both Jerry Coyne and Jim at Apple Eaters have worked over a thoroughly confused article written for the Huffington Post by Andrew Pessin, chair of philosophy at Connecticut College. I want to attack it from a different angle, however. At first glance it seems to be a piteously easy target; Pessin unveils what he thinks is a panacea to religiously motivated political and social conflict. He somehow thinks the missing key is to have believers

Choose some important, life-governing, very controversial thing you happen to believe in with great fervor: the existence of God (or perhaps atheism), the truth of Christianity (or Islam or Hinduism, etc.), absolute morality (or relativism), etc. Focusing on religion as our example, you can now say, first, that you believe, with certainty, on the basis of reason and evidence and testimony, in the truth of, say, the various individual tenets of your version of Christianity, and thus believe, with equal certainty, in all the things entailed by that belief: that, say, all other competing religions and doctrines are simply false.

But then you can say, second, something else: that you may be wrong.

Got it? You can simultaneously be certain that Christianity is true and everything conflicting with it is false, and yet acknowledge that you may be wrong without taking away your certainty. You can thus keep your certainties without having to claim that you are, in fact, and grossly implausibly, infallible. It's what everyone (other than bakers) has yearned for since time immemorial: the proverbial cake, both eaten yet had!

Yup, that's basically it. Not only is it logically confused, it's not even that new. As Jim points out

He seems to think that if people admit to…well, not doubt, but being both certain and not-certain at the same time, that this will alter their actions in such a way that people of different religions can get along. But why would he think this? There are any number of people who admit to times when they question their religious beliefs, but that hasn’t stopped religious conflict yet.

Pessin's argument is truly embarrassing, not least because he completely misses the way in which religious violence is often predicated on just the sort of muddled mindset he wants us to adopt. Religions are, at core, a set of rationally indefensible beliefs that the believer is ordered to protect from all inquiry and doubt (Yes, the miracle of faith!). This means trouble of course; in their everyday lives every human is constantly using reason to make their way about the world. When I get up from my laptop and head to the kitchen to make more green tea I'm going to have to make countless judgments informed by past evidence to guide my actions: walk around that box on the floor and not through it, use the doorhandle to open the door otherwise it will be rather difficult to get to the next room, it's inadvisable to try and drink the tea faster by placing the teabag on my tongue and pouring the boiling water straight out of the kettle and into my mouth, etc. This applies just as much to believers, or else they would never be able to get out of their house in the morning in time to make it to their “Xtreme Teen Bible Reading”. All this (often unconscious) reasoning with regards to how to navigate our material environment predisposes us to prefer confirmation to uncertainty.

Thus, for the believer, having to quarantine and protect their unfounded beliefs from the sort of reasoning they use everyday makes them very sensitive to any sort of threat to their contradictory mental balancing act. Certainly the theme of “great doubt” and “the dark night of the soul” popping up interminably in religious literature tells us that this contradiction is alive and kicking in the hearts of believers, not to mention the ubiquitous praise of faith.

This tension is present in formal religious institutions no less than in each individual believer. Throughout history religions that have attained political power have found scriptural justification for executing heretics and doubters of all kinds. These are all examples of defense mechanisms that have accumulated in the ideological structure of religion. Comprehensive knowledge structures (ideologies) that must protect unjustified beliefs from critique and inquiry accumulate such little gems or perish. We can see these defenses at work most blatantly in religion but also in one other significant area- political ideologies! We don't see these sorts of “epistemological quarantine” as internal features of science and philosophy, but we do see them when science is distorted in the service of political concerns. Political ideologies that are dependent on covering up power relations or embarrassing facts in order to keep exploited populations quiet have these very same mechanisms. Ask any dissident who has been denounced for being “unpatriotic”, a “traitor”, “not a real american”, or simply “crazy”. Without these safety measures present, no religious knowledge structure would have lasted for long without being whittled down to a toothless deism.

What follows from this, I think, is that we must see the repeated history of vicious inter-religious warfare as deeply connected to this “epistemological quarantine” demand that is right at the heart of religion qua religion. The repeated attempts by religions, once they have attained hegemony, to "cleanse" themselves of heretical elements are partly an outgrowth of this unavoidable tension. Pessin, then, is mistaking one of the causes of disease for its cure. Encouraging believers to simultaneously ramp up their “certainty” while constantly encountering threats to that fragile, cherished certainty is a dangerous prescription.

Defining away religion's claims

The skeptical/atheist community has been chewing over (and by now regurgitating!) two important epistemological issues as of late. First there's the debate kicked off by Sam Harris' TED talk and upcoming book in which Harris claims to be able to overcome the facts/values divide and come to objective, scientific conclusions about what is correct moral behavior. There's been some fast and heavy back and forth about it by Russell Blackford, Massimo Pigliucci and Harris himself. I'm NOT going to wade in on this one, I'll just keep chewing that cud....

The second issue is surprising since it seems, at first glance, so simple. Evolutionist and cat-lover Jerry Coyne has made the point several times recently that science can, indeed HAS, disproved supernatural claims. On the face of it this is obvious- open the Bible, read its account of the earth's creation, and then consider that in light of accumulated geologic and cosmological evidence about how our planet formed. Simple indeed. However, some (Pigliucci again!) maintain that the supernatural can not, by definition, be scientifically disproven or even interrogated. This seems only to be true if we ignore the history of supernatural and religious belief. Overall the vast majority of religious beliefs have been things subject to investigation; they have been physical phenomena that have been claimed to have occurred (such as God creating species directly in their present form) or alleged states of the world/human nature (such as that prayer will have an effect). Both of these are equally amenable to empirical investigation. We can looks at the facts gathered in paleontology and evolutionary biology and, using this evidence, falsify the religious claim that God woo-wooed whales into existence in their current form.

Pigliucci's walling off of scientific investigation from supernatural phenomena only works for the most arid deism. That's to say, it's a truism that the tools of rational investigation can't be brought to bear on phenomena that aren't even phenomena, that don't interact in any way with the material world. The moment they do, however, they are subject to investigation (and would presumably be in the Pigliuccian definition ipso facto NOT supernatural). But really, what is this religion that has no interaction or influence upon the world? When has any religious ideology like that existed? Even the desperate retreat of wanna-believers such as Karen Armstrong into a polite, ill-defined and ecumenical deity won't cut it: their God must poke his head up somewhere. Besides, that type of playing-it-safe deism is light years away from the religion of almost all believers today and especially when we consider what adherents and their churches have historically believed. The doctrines of Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc have all contained specific claims of supernatural intervention in the material world. This has happened again and again in their history as knowledge structures. Most of these claims have been proven false, with two responses from the religions themselves. Some religions modified their knowledge structures to remove/abstract/coverup the falsified claims as the Catholic church has done in the case of its acceptance of evolution. It's no surprise this is often the response of larger, more powerful and thus more “materially invested” religions. The other approach was initially to legislate away the problem and forcefully maintain orthodoxy, but the erosion of religious power in many states has closed this option off. The result is “guerilla tactics”, trying to attack the scientific consensus and sow confusion about the status of the evidence itself that has overturned the previous claim (i.e. the Discovery Institute).

Whatever occurred, at the time each of these claims were made they certainly had the status, within doctrine, of being an example of supernatural influence in the world. When heliocentrism was going down in flames under the evidence brought to bear by various Copernicans, the church certainly acted as if the very truth of revealed doctrine was at stake. In other words, they saw the situation as the possible disproving of a supernatural claim!

Culture, Genetics, Stinkheads

Alright, I promised to write a bit more about cosmopolitanism and theodicy, but that's still cooking somewhere in the back of my head and right now I don't have access to enough caffeine to bring it out. In lieu of that, let me point this article, via Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True. Coyne is discussing a recent paper (and the NY Times article about it) on recent work to discover some evolutionary changes in the human genome that may have been selected for because of cultural practices. By this they mean things such as the appearance and spread of the mutation that allows adult human to remain lactose-tolerant even after reaching adulthood. This is the partly contingent and partly human-chosen structure of culture affecting the genetic makeup of humans. Now sociologists are often deeply suspicious of genetic explanations for human qualities, and with good reason- scientific racism is not dead yet! Still, these sorts of studies are of a different sort and cautious enough, though I'm not sure if they can be useful for the social sciences.

This sort of work that should be considered in light the evidence compiled by sociology, anthropology, and history of the extreme cultural malleability of human behavior. One of my favorite prosaic examples of that is “stink heads”, salmon heads buried for a week or more in the ground to rot and considered a delicacy among the Yup'ik. Our biological inclination to avoid rotting food, so seemingly basic and undeniable, seems less like a law and more like a tendency which socialization at an early enough age can overcome. The work discussed by Coyne comes at this problem from the other direction. Looking at both we would say the relationship between culture and genetics is dialectic over the long-term, in which cultural practices can influence our physical makeup and this can in turn affect the development of culture. But again, given the very long time frames and social isolation needed for these culturally-induced genetic effects I think we have to be very careful in seeing what role they may play in cultural and social history, especially in our highly globalized modern era.

More useful to the social sciences ( and to atheists!) might be the application of phylogenetic methods to understanding human cultural development. One cool example is this paper by Steven Jay Gould's old collaborator Niles Eldredge and Ilya Temkin which traces the “evolution” of the trumpet-like cornet (NYTimes article as well). Phylogenetic trees, the “tree of life” style charting that is used to plot evolutionary history, might be a useful tool for charting the tangled path of social evolution.

Once some solid methods are hashed out, these sorts of phylogenetic approaches might be applied to things as large as the changes over time within the institutions that interact over multiple nations, civilizations and even at the level of a world-system. Types of states, economic models, even the way radical social movements organize themselves could have their development laid out phylogenetically. One could certainly apply this kind of evolutionary tree history to religion- the sort of project that I bet would show how “innovation” in religion, from directly political and tyrannical to the more mild polite forms we see today, has most often come from outside its epistemologically frozen structures. You know, from those nasty heretics/atheists/freethinkers/doubters who wouldn't just sit down and “be polite.”