chameleon heir

weblog 7 faith, science and morality; a conclusion December 10, 2008

I began asking about beliefs. What causes us to adopt, retain or discard them? Why does belief in the un-provable seem an essential quality in people? I ask these things because I recognize in myself the quality of a believer and at the same time have observed mutability in my beliefs. That’s of course a long winded way of saying we all live and learn. I’m interested in knowing how and why.

The first writing I took in from Steven Pinker was one that examined cases of young mothers killing their newborns. Not only did he explore several theories on the motives behind such deplorable acts or psychology behind it, but he also explored the ways that our reactions to it may vary across cultures and circumstances. He described it as an immoral act. This got me thinking about morality and how we come to believe something is immoral or not. Religion is part of it and so religion became part of the question about belief. Belief or faith is central to all religions. I began to search out connections between religion and psychology. I found a speech made by Steven Pinker in which he critiques a theory that we humans possess a God gene that predisposes us to succumb to delusions which we call faiths or beliefs. He convincingly argued that it is absurd to think that we evolved the tendency for religion as an adaptation or Darwinian edge in a contest for biological success. One powerful disclaimer is the fact that humor and music are also universal among humans as well as religion and we don’t have any theory that explains them as an adaptation. All three are alike in that many people don’t think that these are essential for survival, so why should they develop and take root in us? To him, our religiosity doesn’t figure neatly into evolutionary theories. It is an accidental in the score of our evolution, an anomaly, a scientific puzzle. He asked questions of how believing in something unseen or un-provable (superstition) would benefit us. He came to the conclusion that it didn’t but that the tendency to do so stemmed from the tendency to apply inductive reasoning and the tendency to trust qualified others which does offer an advantage to its bearers.

After reading Pinker, I looked at an article on the internet by a religious group. They offered a rebuttal of psychology and psychotherapy, claiming that much of psychology is not science but witch doctoring and pseudo-science. They are vehemently opposed to the humanistic theories espoused by psychologists such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. They claim that such things are inimical to the church’s teaching of self denial and sacrifice. Much of their displeasure with the occupation of psychotherapy and psychological analysis was in the fact that these practitioners oppose faith and spiritual healing in the name of science while at the same time behaving as a new religion intending to supplant theirs. It seemed that they have a good argument as they showed how psychologists may deviate from their high ethical standards of scientific inquiry into the realm of wishful thinking and self aggrandizement.

Next, I read Jonathan Haidt. He offered yet another set of thoughts that I found interesting. He professed to be an atheist and a liberal. He explored the nature of morality in Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion. He began with a statement about morality, that we all care so much about it and therefore it is hard for us to look objectively at it. Because most of the academic community looks at things through the same kind of moral lens, he thinks that its members validate each others visions and distortions. He thinks that this is manifested in some of the new scientific writing on religion. He shows that morality is not just about how we should treat one another. Such a simple view excludes the valuation of the group and focuses on the value of the individual. So then there is a duality in the nature of morality in that there are individual values working in concert with group values. He says that there are two ways in which societies can suppress or regulate selfishness.  He calls the two approaches the beehive approach and the contractual approach. Group values are the strength of behives or the world of religion. Individual rights are the strength of contractual societies. He goes so far as to say that every longstanding ideology has some wisdom toward suppressing selfishness and promoting healthy social life. He also warns against a militant form of atheism using science as its cloak of maliciousness. Such activity may subvert true scientific study of religion with its own moralistic dogma.

Jonathan Haidt is an atheist who believes in the conservation of religion because it may hold cures to society’s ills. In his writings he is committed to the scientific method of study. He is not over eager to downplay evidence which might cast his own ideas in unfavorable light. For instance, he speaks of the consistently higher generosity among religious groups verses atheists. This undercuts the argument that atheists are morally superior, if generosity is an indicator of higher moral values. His writing therefore comes across with the kind of ingenuousness you would expect from a scientist. I have imagined how noble it would be to be a scientist, to test hypotheses and bravely accept the outcomes as the ultimate guide to the next step. What is it that makes a scientist noble? Is it that he sets himself aside for the benefit of advancing knowledge, that he is able to rise above the banality of accepted facts and purify out of it the highest knowledge. What makes a holy man noble above the common man? Is it not also self denial in the search for pureness of heart and the fulfillment of the soul to rise above the crowd of banal creatures and escape the slaughter? Let the search continue.