And when you get to the pearly gates and Peter himself asks your warrant for presenting yourself, are you going to say that you're there because Joe the whackdoodle sent you? — tim wood

I don't know. My belief says that my soul dies with my body. Do they take bodies at the pearly gates?

Believers do not experience a different world. — Banno

I genuinely don't know what the right thing to say here is. I'll admit I'm tempted to make Christian faith "adverbial": they experience loneliness, for example, "jesusly" (meaning they feel His divine presence) but I don't. There'd be something you could call "the same" there, but they're still having an experience I just don't. They could try to describe that for me, and some Christian writers have tried to do so, but without the experience, I don't really know what they're talking about.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression there's "something it's like" to have faith, something not describable as holding certain opinions but something that saturates your experience.

I genuinely don't know what the right thing to say here is. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair enough. We're at the edge of the usefulness of language.

We've dealt with similar situations before, in discussion of other supposed ineffable items such as qualia. My approach would be much the same here as there. As the qualia drop out of consideration, so the ineffable "jesusly" sensations... a poor expression, but one that comes down to not using such phenomenological explanations as an excuse to forgive those who consider hell appropriate.

The "something it's like to have faith" goes the way of the "something it is like to be a bat", joining the beetle in the box on the sideline.

What we can put into words trumps what we can't.

All this to say, I'm unconvinced by the objections you have presented to Lewis' argument.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression there's "something it's like" to have faith, something not describable as holding certain opinions but something that saturates your experience. — Srap Tasmaner

Something like a conceptual scheme?

Something like a conceptual scheme? — fdrake

I wouldn’t think so, not exactly. I suppose when I hear “conceptual scheme” I think “taxonomy”, more or less. But I don’t mean what categories you assign things to.

On the one hand, there might still be something here like a conceptual scheme, as my “created natural world” example indicates: there’s an over-arching category into which, well, just about everything goes. But it seems to me the nature of the (now) sub-categories changes if you relate them to a creator — there was no such relation before.

And you can say something similar elsewhere, but with similar issues. If I perform an act of kindness for a stranger, I don’t experience that as following the example of Jesus, for instance. You could say that this is a matter of categorization, but is that all it is? I don’t know, not having experienced the alternative, but I suspect it isn’t. Categorization would be retroactive, right?*** But we’re talking about me comporting myself as someone who believes himself to be within the sight of God. That’s not just a matter of how I categorize myself or my behavior, is it?



*** That’s not right. It would be both: if I’m emulating Jesus, that would also be forward-looking, seeking to perform an act that I will later, if successful, be able to categorize in the desired way.

an excuse to forgive those who consider hell appropriate — Banno

What exactly is it you would be forgiving them for? For having a thought, one you consider a fantasy? Why would that be something that needs forgiving?

You have gestured at a connection:

Belief in hell has implications in terms of explaining the behaviour of the believer. Perhaps there is some potential to understand the cruel behaviour of so many who call themselves christian in understanding the cruelty inherent in their belief. How much of their behaviour can be explained as resulting from fear of damnation? — Banno

but Lewis doesn’t, does he? He upbraids Christians for going along with divine evil — which Lewis believes, as an atheist, is just a fantasy. No one is eternally tormented by a god who doesn’t exist. Hell isn’t real. Christians aren’t collaborators because there is no tyrant to collaborate with. They are willing to collaborate, he says, and that in itself is evil, somehow, even though they’ll never get the chance to act on that willingness.

But you draw a direct line from Christian theology to Christian behavior you disapprove of. (I’ll admit I read the paper hastily, but I don’t think Lewis makes this part of the case.)

Here’s a question for you, Banno. You say above, that “perhaps there is some potential” to explain Christian behavior you find abhorrent by reference to Christian doctrine. And you finish with a question, not a claim. So I take it you don’t consider the case made, at this point, that the doctrine of eternal damnation explains why Christians suck so hard. Will you stick by that? Or are you now going to treat this “potentiality” as established fact?

The "something it's like to have faith" goes the way of the "something it is like to be a bat", joining the beetle in the box on the sideline. — Banno

I don't think so. It seems clear to me that religious faith is an affected (not in the sense of being "put on") disposition, akin to being in love.

It also seems clear that there are many believers who don't really believe at all, but pay lip service in order to benefit from belonging to the religious community.

Then there may also be some who genuinely, viscerally believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. If you believed that it would be so terrifying that you would render worship unto God out of fear. If you were a thoughtful person in this position, then I think the cognitive dissonance would be such that you might divert, subvert any sense of criticism of God by telling yourself that "God moves in mysterious ways" but that He is all-good. all-knowing, all-powerful and all-present. You might tell yourself that he is beyond human conceptions of good and evil.

What we can put into words trumps what we can't. — Banno

Is faith exactly a matter of your opinions on certain questions (the reality of God, hell, and so on)? Is it just some propositions you assent to?

Faith is a propositional; attitude, if that is what youa re asking. After the church fathers, it's belief that is at least independent of, and often contrary to, the evidence.

but Lewis doesn’t, does he? — Srap Tasmaner

No, that's mine.

...Christian behavior you disapprove of. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, I would hope not to be alone in being unimpressed by the items listed.

It's the supposed common "something it is like..." to which this argument applies, not the faith.

Here, for the christians offended by this thread.

“I’ve frequently said I’m glad I’m not God,” Tutu continued. “But I’m also glad God is God. He can watch us speak, spread hatred, in His name. Apartheid was for a long time justified by the church. We do the same when we say all those awful things we say about gays and lesbians. We speak on behalf of a God of love. The God that I worship is an omnipotent God. He is also incredibly, totally impotent. The God that I worship is almighty, and also incredibly weak.

“He can sit there and watch me make a wrong choice,” Tutu continued. “But the glory of God is actually mind-blowing. He can sit and not intervene because He has such an incredible, incredible reverence for my autonomy. He is prepared to let me go to hell. Freely. Rather than compel me to go to heaven. He weeps when He sees us do the things that we do to one another. But He does not send lightning bolts to destroy the ungodly. And that is fantastic. God says, ‘I can’t force you. I beg you, please for your own sake, make the right choice. I beg you.’ ”

Now I do not think this sufficient. My suspicion, voiced above, is that hell is unjust, and further that belief in hell may sometimes lead to cruelty here on earth.

But you may think it sufficient. IF faith is belief that is not justified, then the argument here are irrelevant to your faith anyway.

Then there is stuff such as this...

My suspicion, voiced above, is that hell is unjust, and further that belief in hell may sometimes lead to cruelty here on earth. — Banno

And for evidence, we need look no further than the all but indistinguishable lives of Desmond Tutu and Steven Anderson. Yeah, I see what you mean.

It's the supposed common "something it is like..." to which this argument applies, not the faith. — Banno

That doesn't seem to address my comments, You said:

The "something it's like to have faith" goes the way of the "something it is like to be a bat", joining the beetle in the box on the sideline. — Banno

I implied that I don't think being enraptured by religious faith is ineffable any more than being in love is,

In any case the point was that religious faith does not consist in some set of beliefs so much as it does in a feeling.

Articles of faith don't hook up to whatever proposition-handling machinery you might imagine being handy elsewhere. (Gathering evidence, testing, refining, etc.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's true, but they must have some ties into the world, else what are they by little antigonish's? They need coherence, implication, consequence...something like that, to be real at all in a social world. I'm happy with incomplete commensurability, but not with no commensurability. No commensurability just means we have an entire mental world without a single tie-in to ours and that seems completely implausible on the face of it. It's not a good model of the behaviour we actually see.

So if there are some threads of commensurability, we can tug on them.

Not to mention the fact that Christians, bless them, are a part of our world, and moral actors within it. If we simply set them outside of our moral talk we undermine the whole project of morality (which is about us, not about me, you, them). Morality relies on at least a sufficient degree of commensurability to give a baseline of understanding common to all in the community.

I think that baseline, that commensurability, is in the concept of moral judgement. A Christian child doesn't need to understand the bible to understand that hitting people to get sweets is wrong. Christian adults don't routinely consult their bible or their priest in novel situations to work out who they should and should not spit in the eye of. So it seems 'wrong' comes first, religion then tries to piggyback off that to say 'here's some other things that are also 'wrong' you might not have thought of'. So with the most charitable interpretation I can muster, I find it virtually impossible to believe that a Christian has an incommensurable understanding of 'wrong'.

So basically, you can't condemn these people without condemning anyone who wants revenge. — frank

Happy with that.

Almost the exact reply I've just written to Srap. I think we're very much on the same page here.

Yeah, pretty close.

In any case the point was that religious faith does not consist in some set of beliefs so much as it does in a feeling. — Janus

Are you doubting that it is a propositional attitude - that it is faith in something...?

'cause that's not right.

Believers do not experience a different world. — Banno

Believers understand the world differently. Even a mathematician or artist experiences the world differently. That is because they are conscious in a different way and is that not equivalent to experiencing a different world, if consciousness allows us to enter realms of reality that are beyond normal experience? But that would require levels of being beyond ordinary, everyday experience and this is exactly what theists would say exists.

What you are really saying is that a different world does not exist. More precisely, this physical world is all there is. But even some mathematicians believe mathematics is a 'Platonic' realm that is in some way real.

I am a theist, an artist and I study mathematics. These three aspects of consciousness do lead into levels of being that transcend the physical world.

Believers understand the world differently. — EnPassant

So do bats, I'm told.

How can you tell?

Is faith exactly a matter of your opinions on certain questions (the reality of God, hell, and so on)? Is it just some propositions you assent to? — Srap Tasmaner

Possibly, by way of a bridge, I think the difference being expressed here does not require the 'just'. It is sufficient to carry Lewis's concerns that faith cashes out to propositions you assent to, it needn't be 'just' that, it could be an entire boatload of completely incommensurable feelings/understandings in addition to that (though I doubt it is, personally), but Lewis's argument stands if any component of faith ends up as consenting to some proposition, regardless of what else faith constitutes.

I think it'd be a hard argument to make that any Christian could talk about their faith without assenting to a proposition as an integral part of that discussion.

Hear Desmond Tutu's faith being discussed above. It's replete with propositions about the nature of the God he has faith in and the consequences of that nature are cashed out in exactly the way they would be if 'God' were replaced with 'King'. there seem to be no special laws of cause and effect invoked, no unique moral concepts (he uses 'good', 'right', 'awful', 'reverence', 'autonomy'... and fully expects us to know what the words mean). His faith seems to be describable in ways which require no incommensurable concepts here.

Even though the cause of his faith might be incommensurable - he might have to say "It's just a feeling, you wouldn't get it unless you had it" - what it is he has faith in seems entirely translatable to secular language -

He (Tutu) can do the 'wrong' thing and God won't strike him down with a thunderbolt because God cares about Tutu's autonomy and wants him to make the 'right' choice on his own.

We (the subjects) can do the 'wrong' thing and Our King won't strike us down with a sword because Our King cares about our autonomy and wants us to make the 'right' choice on our own.

At the very least, if Christians really do believe that the subject (rather than just the origin) of their faith is non-translatable to secular terms, then one would expect them to do a good deal less talking than we actually find!

Believers understand the world differently.
— EnPassant

So do bats, I'm told.

How can you tell? — Banno

That is my point. Do bats live in our world? The world of art, literature, commerce, finance, politics? If bats are not conscious of these worlds they can hardly live in them. And that's my point, it is a question of consciousness and whether theists are conscious in a different way.

Is faith exactly a matter of your opinions on certain questions (the reality of God, hell, and so on)? Is it just some propositions you assent to? — Srap Tasmaner

As said above, faith has more to do with consciousness than teachings or intellectual beliefs.

So basically, you can't condemn these people without condemning anyone who wants revenge.
— frank

Happy with that. — Isaac

:up:

Rewards and punishments in this world are instruments of governance intended to incentivise moral behaviour in those inclined to immorality. They do this indirectly, through promises and threats. The government, for example might incentivise folks not to drink and drive by the threat of fine, loss of licence to drive, imprisonment torture or execution.

To the extent that this strategy is successful, the behaviour in question ceases to be a moral behaviour, and becomes common sense selfishness. Which is right and proper for merely human authorities, concerned with social functions. But from a moral god's perspective, where the concern is to produce freely moral subjects, such threats and promises are counter-productive, so sensible moral gods never make them. Rather it is the human authorities that do so for their own administrative purposes.

The confusion between gods and organised religions is one that philosophers would do well to disentangle, especially as 'believers' commonly fail to do so.

It is obvious to the point of tedium that christians will not be dissuaded from their belief by the arguments here. They are not the audience, either for Lewis' article or for this thread. That Srap supposes otherwise is just plain odd. It seems to be little more than a veiled ad hom directed at Lewis and myself. — Banno

Non-believers have been able to excuse their religious friends on the grounds that they are probably not clear-heading about the commitments of their worship. We can think of them as good people who have not see the perpetrator's dark side. In bringing the problem of divine evil to their attention, I am presenting them with a choice they have preciously avoided. Ironically, I may be making it impossible for myself to admire many whom I have previously liked and respected. — Lewis at 242

The argument is decidedly not aimed at Christians - rather it is aimed at the "we" in Lewis's net. His entire article is largely about what you asked initially, Banno, as to how we should respond to "them."

This is why I have tried to focus the conversation about what you understand them to be and whether your understanding is sufficient to result in actual behavior towards them or beliefs about them. Lewis says that he wants to bring the problem of divine evil to their attention precisely to force them to commit to some belief that he can then make sense of and act on. He is talking about individuals, not groups. Those that he knows have committed to the reprehensible belief, not those that can claim some excuse as to why their "faith" is not as ignoble as he supposes it to be.

So rather than seeing any discussion about individuals as special pleading, I think you should see it as essential to Lewis's argument in the first place. Once we have established that someone meets Lewis's criteria, then we have to cease our admiration of them to break the chain of contagion. He is trying to illuminate that which before was hidden about individuals - he isn't simply casting aspersions at the entirety. Can we still admire a self-described Christian who is made aware of the neglected argument without passing on the taint of the asshole god to us? Why Lewis engages in the no-true-Scotsman stuff is a bit beyond me - perhaps he has a bit too much personal investment in what a Christian IS that is not otherwise fleshed out in his (posthumous) short article.

Your suggestion that we simply question any Christian's moral judgment without individual evaluation strikes me as contrary to the article you asked to discuss.

I think it'd be a hard argument to make that any Christian could talk about their faith without assenting to a proposition as an integral part of that discussion. — Isaac

There are indeed a whole lot of propositions!

Suppose you’re a Christian and you’ve been struggling with the concept of hell. On its face, it doesn’t look like something an all-loving god would set up. It’s a problem; how will you go about dealing with it?

First step for a lot of Christians would be talking to their pastor. There will be recognizable propositions here, sure, in the pastor’s explanation, but there will almost certainly also be some statements that strike us as paradoxical, and some statements that are deliberately incomplete (apophatic). It’s unlikely there will be anything you can test empirically, say, in a lab. There may be some reference to experience though: the pastor might connect the concept of hell to the feelings you had when you had done wrong; he will almost certainly counsel you to pray on it.

It just seems to me that whatever’s going on here, whatever the purpose of all this talk (right through to prayer, which is also a sort of talking), it’s not well-modeled as decision making under uncertainty. Consider this: Christians can believe that a proposition is true without understanding it, and will freely say so. That doesn’t fit our model of language use at all! You’re supposed to figure out exactly what’s claimed first in order to figure out whether it’s true. (Meaning and truth are always running mates in our world.) Christians are not expected to understand everything that they believe. Surely that has some implications for analysing their beliefs as a system of propositions, as if it were a scientific theory!

I’m bothering with all this because the argument presented here is not that some Christians have done things we non-Christians consider wrong — bombed an abortion clinic or something — and we need to rule out their faith as a defense for such wrongdoing; the argument is that their holding of certain beliefs is in itself wrong and their persistence in doing so is evidence of their moral bankruptcy.

I’m skeptical of that project in general, I’ll admit. I think people ought to be judged for their actions and the effects of their actions on others, not for what was in their head at the time. *** That’s a bias of mine I have trouble getting around. But here we’re not even talking about what any Christian has done on the basis of their beliefs, but whether the holding of those beliefs at all is morally acceptable. I don’t think we should go down that road, but if we are then I think it behooves us to consider carefully what we mean when we say someone holds the forbidden belief. I think religious faith is peculiar in a number of ways that haven’t been adequately addressed, and is not exactly like everyday or scientific occasions of ‘assenting to a proposition’. I don’t even share the faith in question, but I can see the mismatch without half trying.

Lewis argues that belief in hell is per se immoral, even though he believes those who hold such a belief are merely indulging in fantasy. We’ve barely talked about whether that argument is any good, but I think we get off to a bad start by not bothering to understand what the word “belief” means here.


*** Oops. That's obviously not right. Intentions matter, but as they inform the act. (Hurting someone intentionally is morally different from hurting them unintentionally, duh.) To focus on the thoughts and desires themselves, independent of any action they might or might not inform, as moral or immoral, strikes me as a needlessly "Christian" view.

And you can say something similar elsewhere, but with similar issues. If I perform an act of kindness for a stranger, I don’t experience that as following the example of Jesus, for instance. I don’t know, not having experienced the alternative, but I suspect it isn’t. Categorization would be retroactive, right?*** But we’re talking about me comporting myself as someone who believes himself to be within the sight of God. That’s not just a matter of how I categorize myself or my behavior, is it? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't have any good answers here, and I'm not even sure my questions are good.

I agree with the intuition that it's not 'just' a matter of categorisation. I believe that if someone loses a faith they've grown up in and dearly/habitually held it, the loss has the capacity to change much of their intellectual beliefs and feelings about the world, in perhaps the 'adverbial' way you referenced earlier.

You could say that this is a matter of categorization, but is that all it is?

I think perhaps there's still a way of thinking about it in terms of categorisation - if you imagine a conceptual scheme as a way of putting experiences and concepts into the buckets of a taxonomy, maybe transitioning from a faith to a non-faith isn't just a 'rearrangement of extant buckets' - recategorisation given the same categories - it's 'creation' of new buckets, a 'deletion' of old ones, merging some old ones to make new ones and finally intersecting some old ones. Maybe you can't have a wank without bringing up a cluster of ideas regarding lust, punishment etc.

I think if a person has to go through a 'deprogramming' to lose a faith, or a 'programming' to gain one, faith should be expected to radically change how the world is evaluated; and that goes for moral as well as metaphysical matters.

So perhaps when considering differences in worldview:

Worldviews - I dislike the term - are not incommensurable, one with the other. We must be able to understand at least part of other views, in order to be able to recognise them as worldviews. — Banno

the assumption that the worldview of someone with a faith and someone without a faith are commensurable doesn't suffice to allow the practical evaluation of the faithful's claims to the other through any feasible use of language. In principle possible commensurability does not entail in practice achieved commensuration. IE, just because there might be a theoretical guarantee that you can talk about the same thing, doesn't mean you're ever talking about the same thing.

Perhaps a sticking point between both the faithful and the faithless in the debate is a matter of whether it even makes sense to call the entity believed in's morality into question like they're a person - as if the divine were a hypothesis the faithful cling to, or the divine were an agent.

I think it's a reasonable expectation for the atheist to hold that the faithful could articulate it that way, but it's also a reasonable expectation for the faithless to hold to actually spell out why they're not evaluating their divinity like any other inflicter of great pain - what's the resistance to that evaluation rooted in, really?

Are you doubting that it is a propositional attitude - that it is faith in something...? — Banno

I'm left with the impression that going down to a church and asking for an itemised list of things the congregation believes in rather misunderstands how they believe in the divine.

The impression I'm left with is that having a faith requires a certain necessary compartmentalisation of questions like this away from god, to the level where there's no feasible commensuration between someone who compartmentalises like that and someone who doesn't. To put it another way, moral language games involving Hell or God don't resemble moral language games without either in them. How can you tell? Well, look to use, people talking past each other...

"Tis a busy day, and you both deserve longer replies. But in the interim, it strikes me that you share in the view that christianity ought be judged only (or mainly) from a christian perspective; that seems to be what is implicit in the admonition to understand christianity before commenting. — Banno

Judging Christianity as a religion and making moral judgements about the people who call themselves Christians isn’t the same thing. Lewis isn’t judging the religion, or suggesting that we judge the religion. Lewis is suggesting that we should judge harshly all the people who believe in Christianity.

On one hand, OP seems to be saying we should agree with Lewis and question the moral character of all Christians because they think a villainous god is worthy of worship.

And on the other hand, when someone says, “but that’s not what Christians think”, the OP says we don’t care about what they think and we don’t need to understand what they think before we question their moral character.

So it seems like what Lewis and the OP is saying is, we should question the moral character of Christians based on what WE think they think. I disagree with that approach.

Obviously I like a lot of this, so thanks.

Not much time at the moment, so more later, but one thing I found myself struggling with was that putting things into language is, at least for the cases we usually deal with around here, a sort of categorizing. You can deliberately avoid that, either through paradox, as mystics and zen masters are wont to, or through notation as Frege did (who complained that talking about concepts is to treat them as objects).

One bit I've been thinking about is this: imagine teaching someone how to pray. You tell someone they can ask God's forgiveness. "How do I do that?" First you must have a contrite heart. "How do I do that?" Open your heart to His grace. "How do I do that?" I've run out of words here, though an experienced pastor may have more. At some point you will have to give up describing the experience of prayer as you might a technique and suggest your pupil try it and see what experience they have. I think this is true as well of, say, woodworking or meditation or rock climbing. A lot can be put into categorical propositions, maybe eventually everything, I don't know, but every learner will have the experience of the teacher's words not making sense right up until they have a particular experience and then everything is clear. "This is what he meant!"