anthony, let’s talk about five books that weigh religion and secularism.
The first book I have chosen is from a long time ago: 1670. It was written by Spinoza and published after his death. it’s called tractatus theologico-politicus and there are several reasons why I think people should read it.
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One is that it is far ahead of its time in its understanding of the human nature of traditional religion, and the place of religion in society. Another reason, which has nothing particularly to do with religion, is that it is intelligible, unlike Spinoza’s ethics, for which you really need to have studied quite a bit of philosophy to understand. Ethics is Spinoza’s work that people try to read, but most get very little out of it. his tractatus, on the contrary, is intelligible to all. It doesn’t require any philosophical foundation and gives you many of the main themes of Spinoza’s thought.
And what are those topics?
Regarding consideration, I suppose the most famous ideas espoused in ethics are that god is equivalent to nature, in some sense, and therefore should not be thought of as a personal being.
So, God is not like us?
god is certainly not like us: he has no emotions or desires in the normal sense. so that’s one thing. But Spinoza’s first task in the Tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible as the infallible word of God. (In fact, the tractatus is arguably the first serious work of biblical criticism.)
“the first task Spinoza set for himself in the tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the bible as the infallible word of god.”
He takes the five so-called books of Moses and shows why they are probably not from one person, and certainly not from Moses. As he reviews the various books of the Old Testament, what he is trying to establish is that these writings reflect human ideas, and that they are the ideas of particular people expressed in a particular place and at a particular time. Most educated people accept that now, but it was a horrible idea for the religious establishment in Spinoza’s day.
so the bible is man-made and for this reason no one can use it to claim ownership of a divine authority?
no, and certainly not the Jews. Spinoza was a Jew by birth, although he was excommunicated by his synagogue, and one of the things he sets out to do in the book, and I think he does very well, is to attack the idea that the Jews were the chosen, or most loved, people. by god than anyone.
I think your books were also banned by the Catholic Church?
yes. he was generally considered an atheist, although he certainly would not have described himself as such. he thought he was just trying to show how he really was god, and in fact the german poet novalis called him a “god-intoxicated man”, with some justice, because spinoza never stops talking about god. well, you can’t be god drunk and an atheist at the same time.
“Whether or not you think he was an atheist or a theist, he was certainly a secularist.”
but of course you can be god drunk and not be impressed by traditional Judaism. Spinoza thought that the rules Jews lived by, derived from the Bible, simply reflected the circumstances of the first state of Israel, and because Israel was no more and times had passed, he thought these rules had become irrelevant. the dietary and other laws that bound the religious community of his time, and continue to bind the orthodox, were based, he argued, on a misunderstanding. it was a mistake to assume that god wanted you to continue living like this even today.
Didn’t he choose circumcision in particular to exemplify the human nature of divine law?
yes. Interestingly, he thought that circumcision was actually key to the survival of the Jews. it was a way in which they were marked and united. this was shocking at the time. Another thing that people found shocking was Spinoza’s notion of religious toleration and separation (for the most part) between church and state. Whether or not you think he was an atheist or a theist, he certainly was a secularist. he thought that religion had no role to play in politics. he was, by the way, writing in one of the most secular states of the time, where there was more religious freedom: the netherlands.
Can you briefly tell me how Spinoza conceives of God?
Think of God as identical to nature. this is a slight simplification of what he said, but it will do for now. this is a radical reinterpretation of the idea of god, but on the other hand spinoza thinks that there is a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, which are the traditional attributes of god. Because she doesn’t think of God as a personal being, however, morality ends up being secularized. If god is not like a person, then we shouldn’t think of him as having desires in the ordinary sense, or issuing orders, so we have to think about the relationship between god and morality in a new way. Spinoza’s way is to say that God’s law is justice, charity and love of neighbor. If you let those things rule your life, then you are in fact following God’s law. that’s all it takes to be godly.
“if god is not like a person, then we should not think of him as someone who has desires in the ordinary sense, or who issues orders”
One thing that follows from that, of course, is that you can live a godly life as an atheist. you might want to do those things anyway, even if you believe there is no god. As long as you are living a righteous and loving life, that is the important thing about being godly. and i think it’s pretty clear that educated, moral, non-religious people would say, yes, that’s more or less what i think: if you want to talk about “god’s will”, you can say living a moral life and doing God’s will will come to the same. So Spinoza was a very modern thinker, way ahead of his time.
One of the things that interested me about Spinoza was his rejection of Descartes’ mind/body dualism. he collapses the difference between the material and spiritual worlds and in doing so invites us to reject divine providence – the notion of a god who is different from nature and who is organizing nature from the outside. and in the same way he invites us to see that our own freedom is not so much the freedom to change what happens to us as the freedom to understand why it happens to us. Spinoza argues that once we understand this correctly, we will understand that reality is the only perfection, and this is also what it means to become more godly.
Spinoza certainly had an unusual conception of freedom. to be free, for him, is to understand the ways in which one is determined. That is one of the most difficult things to understand in Spinoza.
while david hume is very skeptical about the degree to which anything can be understood rationally, is he not? including why or if the sun will rise tomorrow, not to mention the nature of god.
Yes, the difficulty of rationally proving anything about God is the focus of my second book, which is Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion. This was published nearly a hundred years after Spinoza’s Tractatus; Again, it was published posthumously, because even in the relatively freethinking atmosphere of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh, Hume’s critique of religion was highly unacceptable. His friends urged him not only to give up the idea of publishing it during his lifetime, but even to do so after his death, because they thought he would consign all these other works to the dustbin of history. No one would read them, because they would dismiss Hume as an evil unbeliever. But Hume insisted and arranged for the dialogues to be published after his death, and he was right to do so, because his works are far from being ignored. This is probably the most widely read of all his books, and I think it could be said to be the masterpiece of the philosophy of the English language.
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That’s an excellent statement. can you explain why?
The secret to its success is the way powerful and original arguments are woven into an elegant dialogue between three thinkers. The form of dialogue is difficult to achieve in philosophy, and Hume is one of the few since Plato who can handle it. the subject of him announced here is “natural religion”. this is contrasted with “revealed religion”, and means the kind of religious conclusions one can come to by reason rather than revelation. So, for example, if someone says “I know Jesus wants me to do this, because he came to me in a vision” or “because that’s my reading of scripture,” then that counts as revealed religion. On the other hand, if someone were to say that he is going to behave in a certain way, or that he believes in God, for certain rational reasons, then that is natural religion.
“I think it could be said to be the masterpiece of the philosophy of the English language.”
the part of natural religion where hume focuses on the dialogues is something often called “the argument from design”, which is an argument for the existence of god that starts from the way the world works and is structured. the suggestion here is that the best explanation for what we observe is the existence of a designer, a god who made us. and this is, of course, a very familiar argument, with an intelligent and divine designer that many people still offer as a necessary adjunct to science, as something that is still required by the evidence of apparent complexity and order in the universe .
What Hume does in his dialogue is to undermine that train of thought in a brilliant series of arguments that I don’t think have ever been bettered, let alone answered. they go deeper, I think, than the Darwinian critique of intelligent design. Hume would certainly have endorsed natural selection if he had known about it. But it is not enough to read Darwin and Dawkins. you also have to read hume to understand the flaws in the theistic argument from design.
what is it that hume offers in particular that goes to the heart of the matter?
One of the key insights is the limitations of arguing by analogy in this context, which is the way the design argument usually works. take, for example, a watch found dumped in a forest. you might say to yourself: this watch could not have come about by chance. someone must have designed and made it. so, by analogy, you could reason: surely nature wouldn’t work the way it does unless there was a designer to make it. now one of the many things hume points out that is wrong with this kind of analogy is that even if you accept the analogy in principle, it still would not lead you to the kind of god we are looking for, but only to a superior one. intelligence that had made the world and the creatures in it. this intelligence would not necessarily be eternal, omnipotent or omniscient…
and he himself would need a designer…
Well, that’s one of the deciding factors. If you’re going to ask where everything came from and who designed it, you really have to ask God the same thing. so if you present god as the explanation of nature, you also have to ask who made god.
yes, a devastating argument. And the final touch, isn’t it, if a designer doesn’t require a designer, why does nature require a designer? what is the need of god at all? Which brings us back to Spinoza, effectively collapsing the difference between God and nature.
yes. And one of the most striking things that distinguishes these dialogues from contemporary anti-religious books, such as Dawkins’s God’s Delusion or Hitchens’s God Isn’t Great, is that none of Hume’s characters are ever presented as atheist or agnostic. . . Even Philo, whose views are closer to Hume’s, pretends to be a believer. Hume’s technique is to pretend that he is the true defender of religion, that he is only trying to strengthen religion by removing the weaker parts. Now the thing is, when you’ve read and sympathized with all of Hume’s writings on religion, you realize that he has, in fact, shaved it all off. but that’s why he manages to be so persuasive. he takes the reader very delicately.
like Socrates in the theater.
yes. It is a very Socratic approach. and since I’m not a believer myself, I think the technique is a much more effective way of showing religious people the error of their ways…
I wanted to ask you about that. what do you think hitchens god isn’t great…?
I think it’s the best of the bunch of recent atheist books, and I sympathize with most of its conclusions. but I do think it strays too far into misanthropy. because if you believe, like hitchens and dawkins and I, that religion was invented by people, then to hate religion is to hate people. well, that’s my main disagreement. And I also think Hitchens is too quick to attribute harm to religion in human history, whereas I think religion has also had many good effects. and when it has bad effects, we must remember that these are people who use religion for their own ends. It’s not like there’s a satan out there who created religion and is doing all these bad things. If you really are a naturalist and don’t believe in the supernatural or god, then you must remember that the harm religion does is the harm people do.
we have talked about spinoza and hume. Spinoza who believed in God but not in religion. Hume who, perhaps, did not believe in God at all.
well, if you were to ask hume if he believed in god or not, or if one just can’t answer questions like that sensibly, he’d have to say the latter, though he certainly wasn’t. tempted by any religious belief. he was a constant and extreme empiricist. he thought that what the human mind could guess one way or another was very limited.
hume also argues, in the same way, that it is not reason that is behind morality, but instinct and habit, and that god appeals precisely because there is so little that can be understood or depended on . which perhaps brings us to the last three books of his, which have been written very recently.
Yes, the next three books I’ve chosen to talk about are all contemporary: one published just a few weeks ago, one last year, and one a few years earlier. none of them are philosophers. The first, called Godless Society, is by a sociologist named Phil Zuckerman and is a study of a very particular phenomenon: religion in Scandinavia today. now you might think, why put a sociologist between spinoza and hume? Well, it wouldn’t be on a philosophical reading list, but I think if you’re interested in the relationship between religion and secularism today, this book is essential.
“there really weren’t any atheists to speak of until well into the 18th century.”
focuses on denmark and sweden, the two countries where zuckerman lived while working on the book. they are two of the healthiest and happiest societies in the world, where most people just don’t give a damn about religion. it plays no significant role in their lives. there are obviously some religious people there, but the proportion is much lower than anywhere else. And this is a very interesting phenomenon, because throughout most of history, including the period when Spinoza and Hume were writing, it was generally held, and still is, by many religious people, especially Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, that a society of atheists must be an evil and unhappy place. for most of human history you didn’t even need to argue that. it was so obvious that atheists were evil.
was there a society of atheists?
There were really no atheists to speak of until well into the 18th century. And in fact it was only in the early 18th century that Pierre Bayle, a famous French Enlightenment thinker, wrote a book that was ostensibly about kites, but was really about all sorts of things, especially this. he made the suggestion that if there ever was a society of atheists, there was no reason to suppose that they shouldn’t be as good as the rest of us. a profoundly shocking idea.
a fanciful? a science fiction writer?
not at all. Bayle was writing about comets to discuss superstition and the idea of divine wonders. More than three hundred years later we really do have the kind of society he envisioned, at least in Scandinavia. What Zuckerman finds is that most people living in these countries are not outspoken atheists on the campaign trail, and many of them may well say they believe in some kind of god, somewhere, somehow. they tend to marry in churches and have funerals in churches, and even get baptized. but these are purely social rituals, thought of in purely cultural, historical and national terms. what is clear, what makes them so different, is that, otherwise, religion is not part of their lives. they do not think of a life after death. they certainly do not follow any traditional or orthodox religion. what zuckerman found about scandinavians is not that they are dawkins and hitchens atheists, but that they just don’t care one way or the other.
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So not even agnostics, who in theory are still working on the problem?
Couldn’t even be bothered with that. questions just don’t arise. and yet here is the really surprising thing. Regardless of how you want to measure the health of a society, be it literal, physical health, social well-being, education, happiness, standard of living, life expectancy, these countries are at the top. so here’s some very convincing proof that it’s perfectly fine to be a non-believer.
however, a high suicide rate.
Maybe, but I think it has more to do with the long, dark winters than the lack of religious devotion. and the suicide rate is certainly not high enough to make a dent in the overall life expectancy of Scandinavians. no, considering what zuckerman is saying, i think it would be very useful for the american religious right, those who warn that society would collapse without religion, to consider how happy the danes and swedes seem to be.
Clearly, Spinoza and Hume are revolutionaries insofar as they are prepared to talk about the possibility of a god without religion, or to gesture about the notion of no god at all. but the modern authors you speak of are perfectly free to speak of these things.
yes, they can be more open, because they won’t be hanged for it.
and therefore are not marginal, but are involved in an ongoing discussion. One of the anomalies in this discussion is America. And here we are sitting in your apartment in New York. So, are we talking about America?
Yes, the next two books on my list have something particular to say about America. my fourth book is by two social scientists named pippa norris and ronald inglehart. it’s called Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Around the World. was published in 2004 and is thorough and powerful in its interpretation of an enormous variety of data. what they are looking at is the data on religious practices in the world today and the extent to which they can be correlated, country by country, with various socioeconomic variables. now many books and articles on the state of religion are remarkably data free, or confused in their explanation of the data, and this is the antidote.
Do people prefer revealed atheism to natural atheism?
they prefer colorful stories, newspaper headlines and poorly digested and collated opinion poll data. Norris and Inglehart do use survey data, among other sources, but only the best kind, carefully vetted and cross-referenced to determine church attendance, etc. The other type of data on which this book is based is data on education, health, wealth, distribution of wealth, life expectancy, and so on. because what the authors are looking at in this book is what’s called the “secularization thesis,” which roughly says that the more modern or economically developed a country becomes, the less religious it is.
“the united states is a very modern and economically developed country, but its level of religiosity is much more similar to that of an underdeveloped country. ”
so, they’re trying to examine that thesis and find a lot to support it, but with one major adjustment. and this trick is what allows them to explain america. Because, of course, the United States is a very modern and economically developed country, but its level of religiosity is much more like an underdeveloped country. Every other rich country in the world, not just the Europeans, but all of them, is significantly less religious than the United States. the extreme contrast is with scandinavia, the others tend to fall between the two, but the difficulty for the secularization thesis has always been america.
so how do they explain america?
what they propose is that religion declines not only because of economic development, but when that economic development brings with it the security that it would be expected to bring, what they call “existential security”. Now what they argue is that America is much more like a poor country than a rich one in which many of its citizens do not enjoy this security. take life expectancy, which is the most basic measure of social well-being. Now if you were to rank the countries of the world by life expectancy, with the longest living at the top, where would you expect the Americas to be?
I’d guess in the top ten, at least.
everyone assumes that. but not in the top ten. It’s not in the top 20 or 30 or 40. It’s number 43, according to the United Nations. And the main reason for that is that tens of millions of Americans can’t afford health care, but there are other factors as well.
That’s almost impossible to believe.
yes, and I think that would surprise most Americans. but it is certainly correct. Now, among other relevant differences between the United States and the rest of the developed world, is the fact that you are much more likely to die from violence in the United States or to die in a natural disaster. and if you lose your job, and there is a higher turnover or “turnover” in jobs than many other places, then much worse things will happen to you, because there is much less supportive welfare state than there is in the west. Europe and other places. So, to cut a long story short, life here in the United States is, for many people, much more worrying than it is for people in other rich countries, an intractable fate seems to play a bigger role, and that affects the culture. and climate of opinion. In America, you need God, because no one else is going to help you.
“In America, you need God, because no one else is going to help you.”
now for norris and inglehart this is not the only explanation for the popularity of religion in america. it is a large and complex issue; For example, you don’t have to spend much time in the United States to realize that religious organizations here provide much of the social networks for a relatively mobile and rootless culture. but if you take into account this research, the relative lack of existential security here, you begin to understand how the secularization thesis is generally correct: that countries tend to become less religious as they become more successful and economically developed. And the United States is an exception because much of what generally comes with economic development has not occurred in the United States.
I guess if one were to think of scandinavia and the states, one thing that might come to mind is the relationship between the individual and the government. that in scandinavia most people seem relatively comfortable with the government, that they don’t mind it, that they trust it. whereas in the states, if you think about the constitution, much of it is there to protect the citizen against an overly powerful government. and that historically the founding fathers of the united states were religious men fleeing persecution from their government.
well, there’s a lot of distinctive and interesting things going on in the united states, a lot of things that make it religious. it’s certainly not just the relatively low life expectancy etc. are other things too. And these other things are discussed a lot in the last book on my list, a book by two British journalists, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, called God is Back: How the Global Revival in Faith is Changing the World. it came out a couple of weeks ago, the title is pretty self explanatory, and what they’re arguing is that religion is back, or certainly not on the decline. the book is quite careful and subtle, and contains various tensions, but the main point is that modernity does not necessarily bring secularism but rather pluralism; in other words, a lot of freedom to adopt and adapt the religion of your choice.
What makes this book valuable is that it has up-to-date research from Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, where there are all sorts of unexpected religious developments. the enormous growth of Pentecostalism, for example, in Latin America; the rise of Christianity in Africa; the coming battles between Christianity and Islam in Africa. god is certainly back in the headlines, 9/11 and islamic fundamentalism took care of that. But that is not all. religion is for various reasons in the headlines. one of the other reasons is mobility. immigration brings clashes of separate cultures, including religious cultures. when there are many immigrants practicing their own religion, the natives tend to practice their religion even more vehemently. so there is a lot of religious activity.
So, God is back?
perhaps in a limited sense. he’s in the headlines, like I said. and he certainly is recovering in the former communist countries. so it is probably true that there are fewer unbelievers now than when communism had not yet begun to collapse. but the secularism thesis, I think, remains true, and the long-term trend is against religion: in the course of the twentieth century, unbelief (although globally still a very minority position) has grown much faster than any religion. .
however, over the next 100 years, we may see an increase in believers in rich countries: this is not because people rediscover god or change their minds, but because of migration from poorer countries and because believers tend to have more children than unbelievers. I think the authors of god is back think the secularization thesis is simply wrong, whereas I think it’s broadly correct. but the continued decline of religion, as economies develop, will no doubt be a long and rocky road, and I certainly don’t think religion will go away entirely. There may be many factors that delay the decline of religion. but I think that’s where we’re headed.
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