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Overview
While A. C. Grayling is a clear critic of religion as a guiding force, unlike some of religion's opponents, he carefully considers the various arguments for the existence of God and the many reasons people believe in a deity. More important, he then offers a powerful alternative to religion as a world-view—humanism—an approach to life for those who wish to live with intellectual integrity, based on reason, evidence, and a desire to do and be good, and one which does not interfere with people's rights to their own beliefs and freedom of expression.
Humanism, as Grayling reveals it, is an ethics of sympathy and tolerance based on the best endeavor to make sense of human nature and the human condition. Though humanism recognizes why the various faiths first arose, it nevertheless argues that organized religion should no longer be given a privileged position in society.
Thoughtfully provocative, intellectually expansive, The God Argument makes a powerful case that secular belief, free of religious dogma, allows for a much more compassionate and caring worldview.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620401927 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury USA |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2014 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 1,114,452 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE GOD ARGUMENT
The Case Against Religion and for Humanism
By A. C. Grayling
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2013 A. C. GraylingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-190-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Clarifications
To put matters at their simplest, the major reason for the continuance of religious belief in a world which might otherwise have long moved beyond it, is indoctrination of children before they reach the age of reason, together with all or some combination of social pressure to conform, social reinforcement of religious institutions and traditions, emotion, and (it has to be said) ignorance – of science, of psychology, of history in general, and of the history and actual doctrines of religions themselves.
This statement doubtless sounds polemical, but that is not the intention; rather, it is a setting out of considered facts, each discussed later in these pages. They are important facts, because understanding them is essential to solving one of the world's greatest problems: how to free the mind of humankind from attitudes and practices which are among the biggest impediments to peace and human progress, and to adopt in their place the humane outlook that is seriously concerned to promote both, and has a real chance of doing it.
In the Introduction it was acknowledged that religious belief can serve as a comfort, guide and inspiration when benign, while stating the less comfortable and larger truth that religion is far too often a form of enslavement, mental and even literal, and a source of harm from which the world needs liberation. Whereas there are other sources of individual comfort and inspiration that are far better than religion – they include love and friendship, family life, art, the pursuit of knowledge and, as noted, the outlook and principles of humanism – there are very few sources of conflict and mental enslavement as bad as an ideology which demands self-abnegation by submission to its dogmas and to the self-appointed interpreters of its dogmas. Religion is the paradigm of this.
So the argument cannot be that the world needs to rid itself of 'bad religion' in order to promote 'good religion' in its stead, for alas history and contemporary affairs overwhelmingly teach a different lesson. What tries to be 'good' or moderate religion is invariably a faint version of its official self, existing only when its votaries have rejected most of the doctrines and practices associated with it. To make a moderate version of their religion they cherry-pick the bits they can live with: the moment anything more serious in the way of commitment and belief enters the frame, threats immediately arise to women, gays, human rights, peace itself – and this whether you are in the Christian southern states of the United States, Jewish ultra-Orthodox settlements in the Palestinian territories, or Muslim-majority countries or communities anywhere in the world. 'True' versions of these religions are by their nature fundamentalist, while 'moderate' versions of religions are temporisations; the path from the latter to the former is short for anyone on whom the enthusiasms of faith take a grip.
Accordingly, when we engage with the reasons for the survival of what is essentially a stone-age outlook in the modern world, it is difficult not to sound polemical; but this is chiefly because the first step in properly discussing religion requires plain speaking – and plain speaking naturally enough sounds harsh when it is about something that for very many centuries has protected itself from scrutiny and challenge by demanding uncritical deference and respect, and too often by hiding behind a smokescreen of what are claimed to be sacred mysteries.
The sophisticated apparatuses of worldwide religious organisations, the polysyllabic treatises of theologians, and the huge congregations of megachurches chanting ecstatically and holding their hands aloft, give the impression that there must be something more significant at the basis of religion's continuance in the world – indeed, a god, or more accurately an entire other reality, a non-material universe according to some views filled with divine beings, saints, angels and demons.
For religious apologists, assuming or asserting the existence of a supernatural agency in the universe, and moreover one that is interested in human beings on this planet, is the basis they claim for the phenomenon of religion. On this view religion is a response to a transcendent fact, the existence of that other supposed reality containing at least one supernatural being.
The alternative view, the view of religion's critics, is that religions are man-made affairs, their roots in early human experience, with all the consequences of this for the metaphysics and morality constituting them. On this view it is no surprise that religion is at odds with so much of what has happened in history and the world today. From this tension comes much harm, to individuals and societies both. Given that the case against religion is an overwhelming one, freeing the world from its influence has to be an urgent goal, however difficult it might seem to achieve.
The first step is to introduce some clarity into the concepts we are dealing with, and to put them into perspective.
Given that the word 'religion' is used to denote such a wide range of phenomena, we have to identify firm central examples. Obvious and unequivocal candidates are Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the various aspects of what British colonial authorities in nineteenth-century India chose to call 'Hinduism'.
We have to be similarly firm in distinguishing between outlooks and practices that are properly called 'religions' and those that are in fact not religions but philosophies. This is a very important distinction, and one that is widely overlooked. Thus, Buddhism in its original form, and still in the Theravada (Small Vehicle) form, is a philosophy, not a religion. So is Jainism, so most emphatically is Confucianism. The differentiator is that these philosophies are not centred upon belief in, worship of, and obedience to a deity or deities, from whom or from which come the commands that construct the correct form of life and belief for the devotee.
Buddhism and Jainism involve metaphysical views that prompt some to assimilate them to religion, but this is a bad mistake. It is a similar mistake to the one that makes many people think that typical faith religions such as Christianity and Islam are the same kind of thing as the public cohesion practices of, say, Roman religion, or (an even worse mistake!) the philosophy of Stoicism. In this latter case, Stoic references to a principle of reason and order in the universe (the logos) are interpreted as amounting to a religious commitment of some sort. But what the Stoics meant by logos is a universal principle of reason, identified with the order of nature. It is not a god; Stoics did not pray to it or worship it. Jainism likewise has no god. The tian of Confucianism is in effect the same as the logos of the Stoics, and is not even remotely a god, goddess or divine entity, still less a transcendent one.
Another important distinction is that between superstition and religion. All religious people are superstitious, but not all superstitious people are religious. To generalise mightily but not inaccurately, the Chinese are not a religious people, but they are very superstitious (this accepts that a minor percentage of the Chinese population are religious; some are Christian – the work of missionaries – or members of Falun Gong and the like: but the operative phrase here is 'minor percentage' of a vast population). This fact about the Chinese, the most numerous people on Earth and a large fraction of the Earth's human population, gives the lie to the theory that belief in a god is hard-wired in the human brain.
An important rider to the distinction between religions and philosophies is that all religions properly so called, and some philosophies, including most political philosophies, are members of a single category, the category of ideology. Noticing this has powerful explanatory value. The Christianity of Torquemada's Inquisition and Stalinism in the Soviet Union were both ideologies that asserted that there is one great truth, and therefore one correct way to live and behave; and that therefore everyone must sign up for it, and any deviation from it was heresy (or 'counter-revolution'), punishable even by death.
One of many reasons for pointing this out is that freedom from coercive ideology is both a human right and a fundamental civil liberty, which is why freedom from religion should figure in any codification of human rights alongside the freedom to have a religion. The right to freedom from religion also means freedom from proselytisation or coercive demands to belong to one, or harassment and punishment for not belonging to one, and – very importantly – from the requirement to live according to the tenets or demands of a religion to which one does not subscribe. As it happens, this right is entailed by the right to self-determination, a fact which is insufficiently recognised and acted upon. The juxtaposition of a right to a religion and a right to freedom from religion entails that freedom to have a religion is not the same thing as the freedom to impose it on anyone else. The only major religion that does not habitually attempt to impose itself on others is Judaism, except that of course, like all the others, it indoctrinates very young, intellectually defenceless children, which is mainly how religions survive.
As implied by the foregoing, to attach a workable general definition to the word 'religion' is both necessary in discussions of this kind, and not easy given the indeterminacy of religious apologists' own many understandings of the term.
One way of dealing with the problem is to tackle it by looking at the contrast between what in general non-religious people say about what they believe and why they believe it, as against the kinds of things that religious people say they believe and why they believe them, as follows.
Everyone possesses many non-religious beliefs, but what distinguishes these from religious beliefs is the grounds on which they are held, and what they are about. Someone who does not hold religious beliefs would be likely to say that he or she holds a naturalistic world-view, that is, a view to the effect that what exists is the realm of nature, describable by natural laws. This is accordingly a world-view premised on observation, reason and science, and excludes any kind of faith-involving element, and specifically excludes belief in or invocation of a being or beings of a transcendent, supernatural, divine or mystical nature. By 'faith' is meant belief held independently of whether there is testable evidence in its favour, or indeed even in the face of counter-evidence. This latter is regarded as a virtue in most religions; in Christianity the case of Doubting Thomas is held out as illustrating the point.
What centrally constitutes the standard examples of religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – is faith in the existence of a supernatural, transcendent, divine being (or beings, if one includes angels, saints, demons or other personae of the given deity), and they further involve espousal of values and practices taken to be required in response to the existence of these beings, including worship and praise of it or them, submission and obedience to the commands taken to emanate from it or them, and so on.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam identify historical human figures who enjoyed a special relationship with the beings in question – prophets, Jesus, Mohammed – and who were therefore able to transmit their teachings, requirements, admonishments, promises, warnings, threats, and more, to whomever would listen.
This follows a pattern found in earlier and other religions – Zoroastrianism, for example. Jesus is alone among the Judaic prophets in attaining divine status, or rather in being actually identified with the deity for whom he began as a spokesperson; but even in terms of religion in general he is not unique, for in the mythologies pre-dating Christianity many heroic figures underwent apotheosis and joined their fathers or fellow gods in heaven or on Olympus.
In this focal sense, a religion not only involves a belief in the existence of a god or gods and perhaps other beings, that is, non-natural beings either in or (if transcendent) outside, yet connected to, the universe, but also that the relation of these beings to the universe is significant – centrally, by at least one of them being some or all of the universe's creator, ruler and moral law-giver.
The meaning of most of these remarks is, of necessity, merely notional. People think they understand what is being asserted, but on inspection a considerable degree of vagueness enters. It is hard to make literal sense of much theological and religious discourse, which is the reason that religious apologists, when pressed, resort to claims of ineffability concerning the central religious subject-matters and the inability of human minds to grasp them. Divine reality is, they say, too complex, mysterious and vast for comprehension. Apologists are here implicitly trading on the distinction between a capacity to imagine or fantasise something and the capacity to conceive of it – that is, form a coherent concept of it. One can believe that one in some sense understands the idea of a being or entity existing outside space and time, while yet possessed of miraculous or magical powers that enable it to intervene within space and time, and so forth – but to form a concept of such a thing is quite another matter.
A good illustration of the capacity to imagine or fantasise what cannot properly be conceived is given by science fiction, cartoon films and special effects in cinema productions. It can also be understood by noting that language is infinite (you can generate an infinitely long sentence by repeatedly using connectives such as 'and' and 'but') whereas our intelligence is finite, which means that we cannot understand every grammatically well-formed sentence that can be generated by language's recursive rules. Indeed, since we can utter sentences that express logical impossibilities, it is easy to show this. Consider the sentence, 'I can trisect a Euclidean angle using only ruler and compass.' This is a grammatical and even in one sense intelligible sentence, but it claims something that is logically impossible to do – and therefore to think. So we can say things (and imagine that we sort of understand them) that do not express coherent thoughts.
Despite the fact that religious and theological sentences very often say only apparently meaningful things, the formulation given above – that religion consists focally in belief in non-natural agency or agencies with significant interests in human activity on this planet, or whose existence makes some necessary material difference to human beings – roughly indicates what religious apologists take themselves to believe. (Some people might believe that there are such entities but that they are not interested in human experience or have no relationship to the immanent universe: functionally this is a view that does no work and can be left aside.) It is a separate matter that what is believed remains unclear; the apologist will attribute this to the ineffability of things divine.
In sum and in brief, then, a religion is a set of beliefs and practices focused on a god or gods. This is what I shall understand by 'religion' in all that follows.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE GOD ARGUMENT by A. C. Grayling. Copyright © 2013 by A. C. Grayling. Excerpted by permission of BLOOMSBURY.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Part I Against Religion
1 Clarifications 13
2 Naming and Describing a 'god' 23
3 The Origins of Religion 35
4 An Axe to the Root 41
5 Knowledge, Belief and Rationality 49
6 Agnosticism, Atheism and Proof 57
7 Theistic Arguments 65
8 Arguing by Design 73
9 Arguing by Definition 83
10 Causes, Wagers and Morals 95
11 Creationism and 'Intelligent Design' 107
Conclusion to Part I 127
Part II For Humanism
12 The Three Debates 131
13 Humanism: The Ethics of Humanity 139
14 Humanism and the Good Life 151
15 Putting the World to Rights 177
16 Shared Humanity, Human Diversity 185
17 The Ethical and the Moral 191
18 A Humanist on Love, Sex and Drugs 199
19 Humanism, Death and the Ends of Life 217
20 Religion Revisited 237
21 Humanism and the Ethical Dimension 247
22 The Better Alternative 255
Notes 259
Index 263
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