Theorising Belief: A response to McGhee and Clark – Nick Dion

Posted by: rbadmin on May 2, 2010 | 6 Comments

I owe this update to a link posted on a colleague’s Facebook page; ‘How to believe in God’, it read. The title obviously grabbed my attention. It brought me to an editorial published by University of Liverpool philosopher Stephen Clark in the British paper The Guardian. The editorial itself was a response to another piece, published earlier in the same paper, by Clark’s departmental colleague at Liverpool Michael McGhee entitled ‘This tedious fixation on belief’.The debate, framed as one concerning the nature of belief in god, would perhaps better be described as one on the necessity of an empirical belief in god in the Christian religion. And I emphasise the Christian religion. For while the term ‘Abrahamic’ is thrown about repeatedly, and certain passages from the Hebrew bible are cited as evidence, the overwhelming emphasis, for McGhee in particular, is on modern forms of Christianity. The only mention of non-Abrahamic religions in either piece is Clark’s passing reference to ‘theistic Hinduism’.

McGhee, who identifies as a secular humanist of Roman Catholic upbringing, wants to argue that ‘believing in god’ has nothing to do with belief in the empirical existence of a god. This is obviously a prescriptive argument; for many, this is exactly what belief in god means, as Clark will point out. With such a statement, McGhee tries to write god out of the equation; if believing in god doesn’t mean believing in god’s actual existence, what does it mean? McGhee takes the ‘cultural route’, framing religion as a form of secular humanistic philosophy: declaring one’s belief in god identifies oneself as a member of community practicing a form of culturally conditioned spirituality that frames how members of the community view life and morality. In short, if I believe in god, I tell others that I am part of a group of people that think about ‘the big questions’ – the nature of good and evil, the meaning of life – in the same way. To be a believer involves no statement of fact, but means being informed by a particular view of the world and of humanity. And this concern with ‘the big questions’ is one that we all share, regardless of our metaphysical beliefs. A path to dialogue between theists and atheists is thus opened.

With his exclusion of god, McGhee transforms religion into a form of secular humanism, one that might resemble his own personal convictions. A professed Christian, Clark holds the ‘metaphysical matter’ of god’s existence in much higher regard. Both scholars agree on the nature of religious practice; as one half of the religious equation, practice is culturally conditioned and does not require belief in the strictest sense. I can still go to church, recite shahada, pray, chant, meditate, and so on even if I do not believe in the significance of these acts. Where does belief come in? For Clark, belief in the existence of god opens up the possibility of justice, defined here as freedom from oppression. His reading fills scripture with didactic tales inciting believers to help the poor, feed the hungry, and behave honestly. But justice is only Justice if it is grounded in metaphysical truth. Hence the need for a transcendent divine. So while he seems to open the door to dialogue by suggesting that both monotheists and atheists share a common pursuit of truth and justice, it quickly becomes clear that real justice is only available to the believer. As he puts it, “Must we not, in fact, believe that God, the Spirit of Justice, does indeed exist, and that He will repay?”

Both positions are problematic, on a variety of levels. I question anyone’s ability to theorise the nature of belief or of religion generally with reference to (at most) two traditions. Several key terms remain underdefined, McGhee’s ‘spirituality’ most notably. While it might seem appealing to rely on ‘spirituality’ as a catch-all term for religious practice free from dogma or the imposition of institutional authority, we must reconcile this with the historical fact that spirituality outside the confines of the church was unthinkable until the 1960s. I also question the place of human agency in McGhee’s description. While religion as a sense of belonging to an ethical community might inform one’s approach to ‘the big questions’, the process is not a direct translation. I might draw on my religious background to think about, say, the American occupation of Iraq, or the ethics of capitalism in an age of disastrous oil spills, but I can also draw on a number of different sources as well. Religions are far from producing uniform ethical agents.

Few things frustrate me more than theorists who suggest that ethical thinking is impossible outside of a religious framework. As such, I admit little sympathy with Clark’s closing point. His position is borne of a desire to know what is right. To be just, we must know that we are being just, and that our suffering will be avenged. As such, philosophical meditations on ethical problems, struggling with the issues at hand, are insufficient, insofar as they cannot yield certainty. Science becomes an adversary as well. As he suggests, how can we believe in justice if we insist that we are “accidentally evolved hominids”.

My counter-position, in its latent Freudianism, would run as follows: There is nothing to be gained from a simplistic ethic, be it biblical or naïve. Easy answers are never right answers, and often risk becoming dangerous answers. We must believe that our actions are right, not metaphysically, but that they are right to the best of our knowledge, given the reflection that we have put into the issue. If this sounds like humanism, so be it (though I caution that my humanism, be it such, would differ considerably from McGhee’s). If it sounds like relativism, I am comfortable with this as well, although with some reservation: while a biblical ethic risks becoming hegemonic, some issues merit such a response. It remains to identify these issues.

6 Comments

Michael McGhee
May 8, 2010
If I understand you correctly I’m sympathetic to your project, although I am cautious of talk of ‘codes’, partly because it is hygenically distant from the interior conditions of judgment and action which seem to me to lie at the heart of ethical reflection and to which codes and principles need constantly to return and answer. Nevertheless you are surely right that people with a similar or the same ‘world view’ can differ in their moral views. But it is the ‘ethos’ of these views that matters, the spirit of judgment as it were … in the absence of which this woman taken in adultery should be stoned, and in the presence of which it is possible to say …
Nick Dion
May 7, 2010
We’re both in agreement, I think, about the need to re-visit our conceptions and definitions of ethics. My ‘simply ethics’ was not meant to deny this; perhaps ‘ethics alone’ would have been a better turn of phrase. Again, I meant to return to the idea, a concern of mine in the original post, about the possibility of a philosophical ethics, an ethics outside of the religious context (issues of genealogy aside). Thus, is ‘spirituality’ simply another term for the ethical thought of the atheist? This is related, in some ways, to the ‘spiritual but not religious’ claim of many Americans, which I was also reacting against.

The reference to human agency was meant to point to the heterogeneity of ethical codes within the religious community. So, on the one hand, ‘belief in god’ as the expression of a worldview signals a belonging to a common ethical community, a shared highest good (à la Charles Taylor). At the same time, ethical codes within the group vary. We have, for example, pro-choice and pro-life positions developed from the same religious community. I wished to highlight the plurality of individual modes of ethical reflection within this same group. So a shared common good/worldview need not translate into a shared ethic.

All of this comes from my interest in the psychoanalysis of ethical reflection. My wariness about ‘spirituality’ comes from the same source. ‘Spirituality’, especially with reference to Buddhism or Hinduism, but Abrahamic traditions as well, is often used in the facile manner that you criticise above to denote a form of religion without belief, usually in an attempt to redeem religion in light of the Freudian critique of religion as illusion. Yes, some people are doing things that we call ‘religion’, like practicing rituals, or thinking about ethical issues with reference to some higher power, but since they do not believe in the transcendent validity of that which they do, there is no illusion. These are often the same psychologists/psychoanalysts who have read and subscribed to the literature concerning the health benefits of certain religious practices and performances. For these psychoanalysts, as for Freud, ‘belief in god’ is an epistemological claim.

Best,
Nick
Michael McGhee
May 6, 2010
Well, I’m waiting for the long haul of elction night results over here in UK … Perhaps you could help me clarify my thinking about ‘spirituality’. I tried writing about it ten years or so ago in a collection edited by Carr and Haldane:
http://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Philosophy-Education-David-Carr/dp/0415296692

I was keen in that essay to tie the expression firmly to the idea of ethics (though not ‘simply ethics’ as though we knew what it eant already, as though it did not need to be opened up and out as our experience grows …

… but my thinking about it is really not stable. You mention ‘human agency’ and I’m not quite sure what in particular you were implying in your piece. You may well be right that we in the West could not easily have separated ‘spirituality’ from ‘religion’ until the sixties, though that is a moot point. That separation has for some thinkers rendered ‘spirituality’ a hopelessly vague term, and, indeed, its use is often pretty vague and unsatisfactory. But one can be reasonably determinate. Thus, you will be aware that there are no obvious translations in the Buddhist or Hindu traditions of the very particular metaphorics of ‘spirituality’ and its cognates, even though there is a commonalty of reference that allows us to talk quite easily about Buddhist or Hindu spirituality. And the commonality of reference converges on questions that arise within the human experience of struggle and conflict in the context of action, the conflict between greed and compassion for instance, that which I would, eg., or video meliora, etc. There is a certain convergence of disciplines and remedies, and so on. You probably know more than I do about the status of the distinction between the Law and the Spirit, about the gifts of the flesh and the gifts of the spirit, a distinction which makes ‘spirituality’ an essentially communal concept, rather than, say, the Cartesian private realm that Nicholas Lash rightly complains of in various writings, including in http://www.amazon.com/Philosophers-God-Frontiers-Faith-Reason/dp/1847065481/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273175081&sr=1-2

these distinctions belong to a specifically theistic way of making sense of the phenomena, of what seems to arise in deoendence on our huan will and what seems to transcend it to our own surprise … I think these notions need to be ebedded in any articulation of secular humanism which has until now at any rate been regrettably silent about such things.

This is a pretty rough and summary account …

Best

M
Michael McGhee
May 5, 2010
Nick

Yes, the spirituality point needs to be clarified, and I’ll try to say a bit more when I have a spare minute. Just one thing, though now. To suggest that it is ‘simply ethics’ without the religious framework could give the impression that ethics is a well understood notion, which I don’t think it is. I’ll try to get back to you soon, good of you to respond. Best

Michael
Nick Dion
May 5, 2010
Dr. McGhee,

Thank you for taking the time to look us up and for your considered reply. I appreciate your complication of these categorisations of religious belief; ‘belief’ in scientific/empirical discourse and ‘belief’ in religious discourse are two different beasts. I would encourage our readers to check out your expanded version of the article’s ideas on your personal blog (http://michaelmcghee.blogspot.com/), where the restrictive conditions of the newspaper editorial format are removed.

I still wonder how exactly you are using the term ‘spirituality’, all the more after reading ‘Spirituality for the Godless’. Is this simply ethics outside of the religious framework?

As you suggest, may this be the start of a conversation.

Best,
Nicholas Dion
Michael McGhee
May 4, 2010
Hi, there, thanks for this interesting post but may I plead that you don’t capture the point I was making about the relationship between ‘believing in God’ and ‘believing that there is a God’? I did not say that the former has nothing to do with the latter, but rather that the former says something different from the latter. To put it another way, I wasn’t making the reductionist move that you saddle me with. The status of ‘believing that there is a God’ is then something that I seek to problematise, suggesting that someone’s commitment to God’s existence is not a matter of *believing* something. It cannot anyway be an ’empirical’ belief as you suggest. That is why I prefer to talk in terms of a conception or a vision of the world as dependent or contingent upon a creative act. Plantinga talks about basic beliefs, of course, and they are basic because they are ungrounded. But this is a pattern of beliefs, that God forgives our sins, etc. But this kind of belieiving is closer to the notion of trust in God’s Word than that of existential belief. I have no doubt that believers think realistically about God, the real issue for me as a philospoher is how to represent that realism, and I don’t think that belief is the right epistemological category. Best, Michael McGhee