Hi Steve, Steve said: Anyway, could you give me your views about the sorts of arguments a pragmatist can make about religion? Can we say that it is not good to believe in gods and simultaneously say that ideas are tools for coping with reality and not meant to correspond with reality? How would a pragmatist argue that religion isn't a good tool?
Matt: I don't think pragmatists can be militant atheists and get away with it in good faith. Neither James nor Dewey were militant atheists, both in fact believers in some sense, and in fact deplored it. Rorty was an atheist, but ended his life saying that secular pragmatists would best state their position as "anti-clerical". What a pragmatist can't do is argue that beliefs based on non-cognitive states like love or hope are illegitimate. That's why I think saying that basing beliefs on faith, tradition and authority are illegitimate is a mistaken use of Enlightenment philosophical rhetoric. Is our faith in our loved ones illegitimate? Should we suddenly excise all of our beliefs about our hope for the future of the human race, because we're Pollyannas, glass half full kind of people? One could say the aforementioned things are based on our experience, but so can a theist say their faith, love and hope is based on their personal experience of God. And what is authority, on a pragmatist view, but the weighted assignment of trust in and seriousness with which we take something that has proven out through experience to warrant such trust and seriousness? And what is tradition but the experience-of-something-working bore out through history? I don't think we can attack theism on any such general bases, though in the particulars we can certainly pressure the unreflective. "_Should_ you trust the authority of such-and-such on such-and-such issue?" That's always a good question, but "Authority is illegitimate" just seems silly. The stance pragmatism takes is one of radical privitization, carrying out more fully the Protestant turn inward. But, on the other hand, that doesn't mean we suddenly captitulate on issues with science, or other naturalizations. Believers get pissed by atoms-and-voiders who reduce everything to physics because it deprives them of a vocabulary with which to talk about God--they cry, "Reductionist!" and start in with anti-reductionist arguments that have been around since Aristotle. As well they should. However, atoms-and-voiders get pissed when believers start in with crazy supernatural stuff that is physically impossible. Believers need to concede the so-called "ontological" ground to atoms-and-voiders, but the latter need to stop thinking they can reduce everything to physics and still be able to do everything, talk about everything, we will want to talk about. The way through the Scylla of supernaturalism and the Charybdis of reductive materialism is to grant the general ontological reality of anything we find it efficacious to talk about and grant that physics tells us the best way to talk about how to predict and control our physical environment. Where everything ends up on a public scale (like what we teach in public schools, or what vocabulary we use to discuss abortion) is a matter of cultural politics, most of which is on a level below the scope of generality and abstraction that philosophy trades in. So, you would be more than welcome to argue that religion isn't a good tool to discuss politics, or rather, one's religious beliefs, while they might inform one's political beliefs, shouldn't be used as premises in political argument because the efficacy of those beliefs can't be agreed on in a free society. Part of the trade of Western modern democracy was that religions could avoid state intervention if they avoided intervening in the state. One of the things America's Founding Fathers saw quite clearly was that, not only did they need to avoid the religious wars of Europe, but mixing politics with religion corrupted religion, too--just look at the televangelists. Money and power corrupts everything. But, as you say, pragmatists must be constrained from saying bald faced "what theists believe just isn't true." They can think so, but arguing with a theist on that basis is question-begging. Religion, like everything else in the Life of History, is still being worked out dialectically on the basis of its Grand Utility to Life. For some, it is still useful, because based on their experience, and their mutual experience with others allows them to form up a community of people who use the same vocabulary and premises for reasoning. In the absence of a God's-eye point of view, whose to say these communal experimentations won't last and prove their worth? Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
