Fish on Eagleton and religion: in the embarrassing argument department May 5, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Religion, Science, Skepticism.trackback
Via Crooked Timber, I find that Stanley Fish is eager to use Terry Eagleton to bash atheists.* The piece relies almost entirely on misrepresentations of mainstream atheist opinion, and a conception of faith and Christianity that would does not represent religion or Christianity as adhered to by most practitioners. In other words, the essay commits the usual theologists’ sins of attacking strawmen and proposing a convoluted understanding of faith resembling the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
PZ’s already promised to have more to say about the piece, so I’ll limit my usual rant to a fairly reasonable size. A few observations will suffice to illustrate the problem. Fish writes,
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”
Ugh. The first question may not end up being answerable by science, but we’re learning more about the early state of the Universe all the time. Science may find that it cannot demonstrate anything about what, if anything, predated the big bang, but Fish/Eagleton beg the question by assuming it cannot. This is a god of the gaps fallacy, of course, and doesn’t become anyone wishing to be taken seriously as a defender of faith.
The second question is phrased oddly, but if it means, as I take it to, “why are we able to understand and value those things that surround us” it is, to put it kindly, odd indeed to say theology answers the question and science does not. Evolutionary theory suggests a clear answer to the question: these things are intelligible to use because we have evoloved in such a way that allows them to be so. It isn’t difficult to see that creatures which cannot interact effectively with their environment are selected against. Human evolution has caused us to be less strong and agile than many creatures, and to have longer periods of regularly helpless childhoods, and in exchange we have big brains that allow us to understand a lot about the world around us, to make tools and solve abstract problems.
The same basic reasoning is true for the third problems: we see the universe as orderly and understandable because a) experience has shown that the universe follows basic laws and that we can predict the effect of those laws and b) because our brains have evolved to seek and understand patterns, even when that ability works to our detriment.
So Fish’s examples of questions only answerable through theology are in two cases clearly answered by science, and even if you wish to assume that the origin of the universe, unlike all of the other now-defunct god of the gaps arguments, will never be understood by science, that still leaves the question of how can something that replaces reason and evidence with “faith” possibly hope to provide true (as opposed to emotionally satisfying) reasons for anything.
That religion is really about experience and not truth seems to be something Fish is on the verge of admitting:
When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton is on the verge, it seems, of arguing that religion, properly understood, is a way of relating to the world, like art and music, rather than a system that makes truth claims (“explanations”) about reality. I have zero problem with the religions of those who understand their faith in such a way, but Fish doesn’t seem to understand that most religious people believe their faith does offer explanations. How else is one to explain that nearly half the American population areyoung earth creationists. They clearly don’t think that religion offers no explanations. Neither does Fish, it would seem, who doesn’t bother to explain how theology can answer important questions but not provide explanations. He does not appear to be using either terms in the way they are commonly understood.
Yong earth creationists and mainstream religious people could be wrong, of course, and Fish right, but how could one determine such things? They are, after all, a matter of faith, by their very definition. Yet I could still forgive Fish his conception of religion which is so out of step with most religion, were it not for his hugely uncharitable understanding of the atheist’s position:
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.
Fish seems to want to claim both that “real” religion is the version here described, while at the same time attributing to atheism (and to “progress, liberalism and enlightenment”) a belief it’s adherents would nearly universally reject. Nor is it any real dodge to say enlightenment and liberalism have been “hijacked,” since he would presumably believe that fundamentalists have hijacked religion, but does not see that as a reason for rejecting religion. Why, then, should we see it as a reason for rejecting liberalism, the enlightenment, or atheism? To make such an argument is strange indeed.
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”
Once again, who holds this belief? No liberal I know thinks that the world is improving of necessity, nor that its improvement is by any means assured? Liberals have no such faith; rather, they believe the best way to improve the future is to work towards a better future. The belief here ascribed to liberals is much closer to the article of faith in “the coming kingdom of God” than to liberalism. Indeed, it differs in that the “coming kingdom” folks don’t believe in a steady improvement, but one in the future, and that they are, by and large, counting on God to make that happen. By contrast, liberals, even liberal Christians, believe it is our duty to make the world a better place now.
You won’t be interested in any such promise, you won’t see the point of clinging to it, if you think that “apart from the odd, stubbornly lingering spot of barbarism here and there, history on the whole is still steadily on the up,” if you think that “not only is the salvation of the human species possible but that contrary to all we read in the newspapers, it has in principle already taken place.” How, Eagleton asks, can a civilization “which regards itself as pretty well self-sufficient” see any point in or need of “faith or hope”?
Here Fish/Eagleton seems to be confusing a belief in the inherent self-sufficiency of humanity with a rejection of untestable theological claims.
Science, says Eagleton, “does not start far back enough”; it can run its operations, but it can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to its own excesses.
Science routinely corrects for its own excesses, in that they are eventually falsified and rejected. Science, being a human endeavor, is not perfect at this because its practitioners are imperfect, but it provides a mechanism for evaluating claims and so is self-correcting. Fish/Eagleton reject this, and propose, you guessed it, faith as the corrective for science:
Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
Conflating “faith” with “reasonable assumptions” is a neat trick here, but not a useful one. Faith obviously cannot justify its own assumptions any more than science and reason can, and lacks any ability to use evidence and reason to self-correct, having established itself here as fundamental to and above reason. Reason and evidence, we are being told, are imperfect, and therefore must be build from a foundation of unfalsifiable belief systems in unperceived, unknowable beings. How this will improve things is, naturally, left unexplained.**
Faith and knowledge,” Eagleton concludes, are not antithetical but “interwoven.” You can’t have one without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality: “All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment.”
In other words, when “faith” is understood so broadly that it encompasses all our means of understanding the world, then we can safely say the world can only be understood through faith.
…we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.
We’re now expected to believe that reason is itself faith, and faith requires less faith than reason. It is amazing what one can achieve through circular reasoning and redefinition of terms.
“There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”
One wonders how these people are standing in the way, and of what’s way they block. One also wonders how “liberals” and “atheists” have come to be grouped in such an odd way, that somehow my (liberal atheist) views are conflated with Hitchen’s warmongering, a group of “flag-wavers” who do not seem to exist, and “dogmatists” (presumably this last group is defined more clearly in Eagleton’s work, but in Fish’s essay it never extends beyond strawmen.
What are we to take away from this mess? Apparently evil liberal atheists with their supreme faith that the world must improve and reason will solve all our problems and Muslims are bad must learn that we have nothing on those who express faith–so long as the faith they express explains nothing, but underlies everything.
I’m hard pressed to find a reason to take such an argument seriously. Over the summer I will attempt to find time to read Eagleton’s work, to see if his argument makes more sense than Fish’s portrayal of his argument does.
*Aside: I’m assuming Fish presents a fair assessment of Eagleton’s thinking, since it’s the end of the semester and I don’t have time at the moment to dig into Eagleton’s work more broadly. So consider this post a response to Fish’s argument-through-Eagleton, not directly of Eagleton’s argument.
**It’s also important to note that reason and science generally procede from the assumption that the universe is orderly and knowable, an assumption which can then be tested with the tools that spring from it. We assumed the universe was orderly because we evolved to do so, and now we make massive detailed predictions that are shown true because of, say, quantum mechanics and relativity. Religion makes no real predictions and provides no tools for testing them. One might temporarily accept something “on faith” when the evidence is not yet accumulated, a position which correctly puts faith secondary to reason. Fish/Eagleton seem to propose the opposite, though, and suggest making reason dependent upon faith, a move that undercuts any attempts at understanding. Such a conception of religion both argues that it can’t explain anything, and that it must be the foundation upon which reason is built, thereby making it the only possible means of building explanations.
“Conflated” is the right word. I went to Fish’s column to see what might hold this together. It seems to follow the model of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, in order to prove that the world sucks because of the Enlightenment, hence the contradiction in saying that because of science, people can’t pay attention to the big explanations religion provides, yet also that religion doesn’t provide explanations, through the clever line about Chekov and a toaster or the other line about ballet. I don’t like the overgeneralization of that any more than when some say the world sucks because of religion, that all the lies, hatred, indifference, violence, suffering and meaninglessness of the modern world is the fault of religion. No, the biology and culture of such evil is a complicated thing, more complicated than any single reason. That both the religious and the anti-religious try to oversimplify that is very human of them. It is not just their beliefs that made them that way. It is their human nature, something one really should study before getting off into so much abstract fantasy.
You give in too easily on the limits of science. Speak for yourself about anything not being answerable by science, though I should say I include unverifiable, personal empiricism as something more disciplined science has taught me to mine for whatever answers aren’t yet in textbooks. That first quote you use is preceded by this: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.” That’s what keeps all but the faithful from understanding the majesty that God runs everything? Oh, baloney.
I remember being in that overheated church in Albuquerque that my mother insisted I attend through my confirmation. I felt like passing out too much to keep praying like everyone else. I may have met God just a little in those moments as I silently said something like, “God, this is awful.” I’m not sure if there’s a really big question in that or not, but it’s not the ones Fish raised.
In contrast, there were both big questions and answers in my college physics classes. I remember the discussions about the fate of the universe depending on whether there is sufficient mass for gravity to pull everything back together. There were equations and numbers and everything about how much mass was necessary. Then came the discovery last decade of how the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Oops, all those previous discussions are now of only historical significance. I didn’t hear it in college, but there already had been speculation about there being additional forces than the 4 forces established previously. That is no longer speculation. It is now empirically likely that there are at least 6 forces to account for what goes on in the physical universe. Anyone can scoff that this is a lesser answer than God going poof being the answer to everything, as if God never changes. Maybe God does, and they don’t know. Maybe the universe does. Maybe we all do. Scoffing comes to people naturally. It doesn’t mean anything more than that.
Yet it is this scientific answer that comes through trial and error, through discovery, that is the better answer, one that will stand up to scrutiny and further change better, than the conclusion our ancient ancestors came to that some hidden cause explained everything they saw. Neuroscience can teach us how the latter comes to us naturally, without data, because our brain is biased toward looking for hidden causes, presumably an evolutionary advantage. If so, someday we’ll know the specific genetics behind it. If not, we might have an even better answer someday, still better than that God went poof.
Data is better than just relying on the intuition evolution has given us. People still use their intuition all the time anyway. It’s who we are. It’s the biggest reason some scientists can say some very unscientific things. Yet slowly the idea is growing that it’s better to have data as well as intuition, good data, since experience teaches how not all data is good.
That’s a big answer. It may even be the ultimate answer. It’s certainly a better answer than believing God goes poof because any religion says so. I learned this from science. I learned this from asking God about it in prayer. Which was more important? Beats me, it seems like a cooperative effort to me. I do know that pure faith leaves nothing but gaps, despite how many spiritually minded people have been trying to perfect it for millenia, despite apologists trying to deny the gaps in religion. The gaps some see in science may be nothing more than a temporary lack of data. My God knows this. Why few people see it this way is interesting to me in terms of both the neuroscience of beliefs and my conversations with God about being different, but that doesn’t change how I came to my beliefs. There are both reasons and faith behind that. Cut either out, and I would be more of a conformist, in one direction or the other. I haven’t heard either reason or faith that makes such conformity attractive to me.
Meanwhile the book Stanley Fish is pushing sounds to me like something as obsolete as those discussions I had in college about how gravity might stop the expansion of the universe. It’s rational in its own little hypothetical universe, but it’s seriously lacking data. Almost everyone is having difficulty adapting to the scientific revolution, atheists as well as theists. The ongoing expansion of science will help that in one sense, but maybe aggravate it in others. 21st century evolution will have many more examples of specific genes changing instead of more difficult to understand abstract principles. Neuroscience may yet get through to people that we all have built-in bias, that we all can be manipulated through conformity and whatever else.
Yet with all the facts one can have, there is still this gap between our knowledge of facts and how we can best live our lives, as individuals, as communities, and as a world. Maybe someday we’ll even have enough facts to fill that gap, but it won’t be this century. In the meantime some will say that only God can fill that gap. For my own life, God is essential for how I live, but God alone would not be enough. At the same time, in promoting religion Stanley Fish is writing about filling my life with a lot more than God. That’s the problem.
Throughout religion, politics, and other parts of life, people are forever saying those other people are the problem, not the person in one’s own mirror. It’s human nature to do that, whatever cooperation between biology and culture brings it about. I suppose there’s often some truth in the fingerpointing, but it is so much work to figure out exactly how much or how little. I wouldn’t want to do it for a living.
For one thing, part of the analysis is always the same. The author went off track in some predictable orgy of human nature, oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, making his or her subject black and white. Fish does these, and winds up thinking the Enlightenment is his enemy. I don’t think so. I think the Enlightenment is the solution to his discontent, if only he would take it as prescribed.
I’m not going to get anywhere trying to tell him that, any more than I would trying to tell someone who thinks God is the enemy that God is the solution. How do you define “God”, anyway? It makes such a big difference. Christianity has been such a big part of our culture that both atheists and theists seem to assume that God is whoever and whatever that character is going poof in the first chapter of Genesis and beyond. People can have such a hard time distinguishing between a script and reaIity. It doesn’t have to be that way. I wonder if Fish or Eagleton ever consider that. The Enlightenment definitely helped this.
Self-examination is so much more efficient than denouncing others. Maybe more people would find God in moments of self-examination. I wonder if Fish or Eagleton would consider promoting that instead of some pre-packaged “faith”.
Stanley Fish is certainly a gentleman, graciously turning the other cheek to Terry Eagleton. Eagleton has been spearing Fish since the 80s. Eagleton is admired for his fits of critical venom, of which few have been as delightful as the one he unleashed on Fish in 2000 (reprinted in Figures of Dissent, 2003). Eagleton compared Fish to Donald Trump, “a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect . . an old-style, freebooting captain of industry who has no intention of clasping both your hands earnestly in his and asking whether you feel comfortable with being fired. He fancies himself as an intellectual boot-boy, the scourge of wimpish pluralists and Nancy-boy liberals, and that ominous bulge in his jacket pocket is not to be mistaken for a volume of Milton.” According to Eagleton, Fish showed “contempt for what he calls ‘mutual cooperation and egalitarian justice’, macho scorn for tolerance and impartiality.” Also, Fish is “something of a bruiser, and furnished with the ferociously competitive instinct of the small boy” and “might profit from relishing power a little less flamboyantly . .” Fish is (or was) no less than “a Hobbesian and a Machiavellian who enjoys conflict, believes only in what he can taste and handle, and likes to win.”
Eagleton has Fish a “sabre-rattling polemicist given to scandalously provocative pronouncements. . .in hot pursuit of a case that will succeed in alienating absolutely everyone . .” So what is this latterday Monster of Malmesbury (as Hobbes was called for his atheism) doing defending Eagleton’s spirit against Ditchens atheism? If you read Fish’s previous blogs on the issue, you will see that he has not declared for one side or the other. I have the feeling that his using Eagleton against the “schoolyard atheism” of Ditchens is only a tactic in the development of a statement intended to scandalize both sides. Or maybe he’s just mellowing.
More on how best to answer “Why?”:
Consider any question one might say is unanswerable by science. To be specific how about, “Why does anything exist?” I’m confident that the best answer science gives me for that, right here, right now, is, “I don’t know.” I feel quite satisfied by that answer, and find it interesting that anyone would claim that a specific answer from theology is more authoritative or otherwise superior to the above answer in any way. It’s not superior if it’s wrong! If everyone else’s specific answer is wrong, then science’s “I don’t know” is a very good answer, a very useful statement of reality, definitely representing progress over older answers that were more about filling in gaps than knowledge.
It’s not just my personal experiences of science and religion that give me more confidence in empiricism, even when that leads me to conclude I lack data, than in dogma or revelation. Anyone objective enough can see the difference in what kind of processes these are. Dogma depends on wordy arguments that connect to other wordy arguments. I admit one has to witness this collapse once to appreciate just what a house of cards all dogma is, but that’s just a little bit of experience. Then there’s revelation that might be how God was experienced by ancient people, since then converted to dogma, or how people perceive revelation from God in the present. People inside and outside of churches are skeptical of such revelation, for many good reasons.
I’ve known people in charismatic churches who heard words from God. I also made it a point once to read everything I could find from people who quoted God directly, whether they were evangelical Christians or New Age. There were common traits to these writings, traits that transcended how the specific messages varied. As described this way, God is simplistic and doesn’t know as much about the physical world and society as I do. I wanted to find one person whose God matches the various ways I experience God. I failed to do so.
It’s a long story to describe how one can answer how it might be that perceptions of God differ so much, answering from science and/or faith, but it is clear that they do, to a degree that makes revelation a questionable way to answer anything. I want confirmation, be that from science, God, something. I am a child of the Enlightenment. I’m sure I’m better off for it.
People tend to argue about some specific answer without considering the entire context one can have for that answer from either science or faith. When I say I don’t know why anything exists, I know much more than that. I know from physics that there is no requirement that the universe came into existence at the beginning of time. It may have been a package deal, past, present and future. The Bible says creation was at the beginning, but was that just what its literary style demanded? People’s common sense says the same, whether because people know their own existence began at the beginning of their time or something else. No, that’s a bias people have from their ordinary experience. The relevant mathematics says otherwise.
The only place I’ve seen this presented popularly was in Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in the chapter where he writes about imaginary time, by which he didn’t actually mean “imaginary”, but using imaginary numbers for time instead of real numbers. That was easier for me to understand as I had previously read a paper he wrote on a mathematical analysis of the universe under the boundary condition that there is no boundary, in time, in space, or any other dimensions. It makes so much better sense as math than it does as words.
My “I don’t know” connects to a lot of things like that. If someone else’s specific answers neglect all such side issues, if someone can’t give me a very good reason why the universe did indeed begin at the beginning of time and doesn’t understand that there was no time before that, those are not superior answers. I don’t think King and Eagleton know that.
Instead I think I perceive quite a bit of nostalgia in what they write. Part of what they want is to go back to where their simplistic answers are good enough. Part of what they want is for the secular world to be causing the harm they see to their church. Notice they don’t say anything about how the church has harmed itself. Part of the appeal of oversimplifying the villain of a problem is so one can have hope that such a simple problem can then be fixed. Reality is rarely so simple.
Humanity’s adaptation to the scientific revolution is not that simple. I’d be surprised if it’s even half over. Thank God if it’s really only 40% of us who are still lost in the idolatry of the Bible. Who knows if the trauma that the scientific revolution is doing to old ways is getting better or worse, but there’s no going back. It’s not all bad to lose one’s virginity, literally or figuratively, but there definitely is some adaptation involved, for some people more than others.
I sympathize that people want faith to still be meaningful, but I wish people would start their rhetoric about that with the difference between “faith” in the unbelievable as a belief system and faith as a trust in God, a relationship with God, an acceptance of something higher than me. My confidence in empiricism certainly has an element of that latter sort of faith, something generalized from all the specific experiences I’ve had of science paying off for me intellectually. Someone who wants to denigrate science can certainly butcher the reality of that with ambiguous words. The God of my understanding is so much better than that. So I wonder what God people are talking about who say science is just another kind of faith. It’s not a good testimony when people say stupid things.
Yet it’s also true that as satisfied as I am with the above “I don’t know” being just fine as to the facts of the universe, something in me asks another question. I have asked God, “Does existence matter to You?” in various ways. In various ways I get a non-traditional response, that existence is not on purpose, not in the biggest picture, but it is an opportunity, both physically and spiritually, whatever spiritually means now that science knows all about oxidative phosphorylation and that no spirit keeps us alive. It means something non-physical. More questions and answers follow, but nothing I would want to share. There’s an obvious difference between my talking about science, which I’ll do at length, even though some of it involves me personally, and my faith, which is much more personal and subject to attack both by those who hate faith in general and those who hate everyone else’s faith.
I suspect some of the fingerpointing Fish and Eagleton do is because of that last phenomenon. I wish they had approached writing about that as good scientists instead of with whatever words came to them. It’s not the scientific revolution that hates faith. It’s people that hate faith, some generally, some specifically, always for some reason. That doesn’t change from some wordy fantasy about faith. It might not ever change. One can learn more facts about it. One can explore one’s own responses to those facts. But a rant is just a rant, and means starting over from scratch some later day. Both science and faith have shepherded me through that experience. I suppose Fish and Eagleton lack such experience. I’d give them mine. There’s such interesting neuroscience behind why they would or wouldn’t take it from me, maybe something spiritual, too.