God is Not a Scientific Hypothesis

Professor David Novak, reviewing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (subscription required for full access):

We could say that statements about God are not scientific hypotheses at all, since we are not speaking of God as a cause operating within the natural order, which is the sole order about which natural science can speak with any cogency. And, even when we do speak of God as the creator of the universe and all it contains, we are not speaking of a God whose existence has been inferred from human experience of orderly nature. Instead, we are speaking of a God who commands our community, through his historical revelation to our community, to acknowledge his creation of that natural order in which our historical relationship with him takes place. So, all that this asserts about the world is that the world is a creature, ever dependent on its creator, but in specific ways beyond our ken inasmuch as there is no evidence for creation from within what we normally or ordinarily experience in the world–a point best made when God finally reveals himself at the end of the book of Job.
. . .
Anything we can cogently say about God can only be based on a revelation of God we have either experienced firsthand or heard from people whose accounts of what they did experience we have no reason to distrust. For Jews, that prime experience is the revelation of the Tora at Mount Sinai and the Exodus from Egypt that made it possible for the people of Israel to experience that revelation. Not being a hypothesis but, rather, testimony, all that Dawkins could argue about it is that such experience is improbable, but not impossible, the only impossibility being logical impossibility. But such experience is by definition improbable[.]

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Copleston vs. Russell

Here is a transcript of the famous 1948 BBC radio debate on the existence of God between Father Frederick C. Copleston, a Jesuit priest, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. The debate has a level of sophistication rarely seen today, especially in popular discourse on religion. Read the whole thing; it’s excellent.

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God as Storyteller

Hashgacha pratit is the doctrine that God exercises providence over the day-to-day activities of a person’s life. There is, at first glance, a tension between hashgacha and “natural causation.” By “natural causation”, I mean the basic idea that events in the world are caused by other prior events. (This tension exists on both determinist and libertarian conceptions of causation.) How can events in the world be a product of both divine providence and natural causation? Doesn’t one have to be the actual cause and the other a facade? I think the answer lies in the unique way that God acts in the world. Natural causation describes the relationship of physical events to other physical events. But God, like the author of a story, arranges those events from an entirely different perspective.

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MacIntyre on Emotivism

Emotivism is the view that ethical judgments are simply expressions of approval or disapproval. For the emotivist, the statement “this is good” means roughly “I approve of this” or “hurrah for this”. Most people would agree that ethical statements contain expressions of approval or disapproval. But the claim of emotivism is stronger. It asserts such statements are nothing other than expressions of preference.

There are several strong arguments against emotivism. For example, it is counter-intuitive to an extreme. When we debate morality, we believe that our position is somehow more justified than the position we disagree with. Otherwise, we wouldn’t bother trying to persuade. Emotivism requires that we reinterpret every ethical disagreement in history as merely a struggle for power. While ethical disagreements may mask struggles for power, as in some political discourse, emotivism entails are such disagreements are, by their nature, struggles for power.

In After Virtue (pp. 12-13), Alasdair MacIntyre articulates another strong refutation:

“Moral judgments express feelings or attitudes,” it is said. “What kind of feelings or attitudes?” we ask. “Feelings or attitudes of approval,” is the reply. “What kind of approval?” we ask, perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds. It is in answer to this question that every version of emotivism either remains silent, or by identifying the relevant kind of approval as moral approval – that is, the type of approval expressed by a specifically moral judgment – becomes vacuously circular.

What is “moral approval?” I would say it is approval based on the belief that a particular act is morally good. But this answer is unavailable to the emotivist, who defines “morally good” as an expression of approval. The emotivist, thus, is unable to distinguish between my dislike of citrus fruit from my dislike of genocide. But the difference between the two is profound. I dislike fruit because I don’t like how it tastes. I dislike genocide because it’s immoral.

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“The Ecstasy of Deeds”

In “Heschel, Intuition, and the Halakhah”, Rabbi Marvin Fox takes issue with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s reliance on intuition as a basis for faith in God. The common objection to any intuition-based theory, R. Fox argues, “is that we have no reliable way to distinguish between those experiences which are genuine perceptions of a higher reality and experiences which are delusions or hallucinations.”

Perhaps more important, though, is R. Fox’s second objection. The kind of awe-inspiring, life-changing experiences that R. Heschel has in mind are limited to prophets and, at best, the great religious personalities of each generation. “A conception of religion which is rooted in such experiences automatically restricts the realm of faith to a small group of the spiritually elite.” Rather, R. Fox maintains, it is the performance of mitzvot, above all else, that can open the doors of faith to all.

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Erich Fromm on Freedom – Between Pesach and Shavu’ot

I am currently reading a book by Erich Fromm called Escape from Freedom. Broadly speaking, it deals with freedom, the challenges it presents, and the various responses to it. For Fromm, one of man’s central fears is the fear of being alone and isolated from the world around him. (I use “him” and “man” as gender-neutral throughout.) On the individual level, part of the maturing process is “individuation,” in which a person sees himself more and more as separate and distinct from his parents, his family, and his surroundings, with his own ideas, desires, will, and character. On a societal level, Fromm sees the same process happening in history, where man emerged from feeling completely a part of the animal kingdom and the natural world around him to becoming distinct from it. Both of these processes result in anxiety and isolation. Similarly, the historical trend toward greater individual freedoms resulted in the same anxieties. Having a set place in society may have been constricting, but it was, at the same time, very comforting. One knew his place, and that place saved him from isolation. He was part of a greater pattern, part of his social caste, part of his church. Modern man in democratic societies, with his immense personal freedoms, is challenged by that freedom. In Fromm’s words, we have achieved “Freedom From.” Freedom from tyranny, freedom from religious oppression, etc. But the challenge is to have “Freedom To.” What do we do with that freedom? In Fromm’s view, rather than productively dealing with the challenge, modern man instead runs from that challenge in many different ways.  The most common in non-authoritarian societies is conformity. If I am not too different, I am not alone. To quote him:

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Constitutional Values

Law professor Geoffrey Stone takes aim at the way conservatives have framed the debate over the role of judges in our political system.

For 30 years, conservative commentators have persuaded the public that conservative judges apply the law, whereas liberal judges make up the law.

According to Stone, Chief Justice Roberts’s analogy of an umpire calling balls and strikes and Justice Scalia’s claim that conservative jurists merely apply the “original meaning” of the framers are “appealing but wholly disingenuous descriptions of what judges . . . actually do.”

I agree with Stone that judges are not the political umpires of the conservative imagination. They are regularly called upon to make important policy decisions without explicit guidance from the Constitution. Stone undermines his case, however, when he fails to articulate a coherent liberal jurisprudence, but instead focuses on cases with merely left-friendly outcomes.

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On Ta’amei Ha-Mitzvot

The term “ta’amei ha-mitzvot” literally translates as “reasons for the commandments.” The question “why should we do mitzvot” is easy to misunderstand. Many simply reply “because God said so”, which, even if correct, merely prompts the question, “why did God say so.” To answer that second question with “just because” or “no reason” renders God’s will arbitrary and thus, lacking justification.

The question should properly be broken down into two related but distinct questions: (1) why did God command us? and (2) why should we follow that command?

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“A Stream of Tendency”

Benjamin N. Cardozo in The Nature of Judicial Process:

[E]very one of us has in truth an underlying philosophy of life, even those of us to whom the names and the notions of philosophy are unknown or anathema. There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them – inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs, a sense in James’s phrase of “the total push and pressure of the cosmos,” which, when reasons are nicely balanced, must determine where choice shall fall. In this mental background every problem finds its setting.

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Philosophers’ Carnival 105

The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at blog.kennypearce.net, featuring my post on unequal justice.

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