5. Evolution of Religion (3)----The Meaning of God

Chapter 8: Belief in Belief

(1) Strategic Belief Maintenance.

Once we commit ourselves to certain beliefs, belief systems, or creeds, we find it difficult to change or abandon these beliefs. Religious beliefs aside, we feel committed to the integrity of scientific procedures, think it a good thing to spread the belief in democracy, consider the belief in the rule of law to be vital to our society and fear the consequences of abandoning the belief in free will (201f). If the myths we live by conflict with the facts, then we’re prepared to “print the myths” instead.

Dennett recognizes several mechanism—or “protective screens”—which serve to maintain beliefs. (1) Self-esteem---once we commit ourselves to a position, we seem to acquire a vested interest in preserving it as, perhaps, a matter of self-esteem. (203f) (Think of people in the 1920s who were enthusiastic supporters of the Russian Revolution and slow to abandon their commitment after Stalin took power.) (2) Fear of Consequences---as with the case of free will above, there is fear of consequences to self and society if one abandons some central belief. (202) (3) Denunciation—when people come to doubt some central tenant of one’s creed, first line of defense is often to place discussion of the tenant as somehow out-of-bounds (transubstantiation is incomprehensible to human mind, democracy is worst form of government except for all the others). If that fails, the doubter is condemned as traitor.(207) (4) Creed Revision—this is a mechanism by which a meme adapts itself to a new environment: we continue to use terms such as matter, space and time though, it could be argued, that these concepts have radically changed in the last 300 years. Dennett points out that the concept of God has shifted even more radically from that of concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts (205).

(2) Intensional Objects.

“You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend” – Rich Jeni on why religious wars are pathetic.

Dennett’s discussion in this section is based on work in semantics and philosophy of language. We often think of words standing for things and the meaning of a statement (and its truth) as depending upon whether the things referred to by noun phrases stand in the relations specified by verbal and adjectival phrases. But what happens when there is no referent for one or more of the words? Does the sentence become meaningless or just false? And can a negative existential statement ever be true?

Think about the following statements and how they differ from one another.

1. Ponce de Leon searched for the Fountain of Youth
2. Johnny can’t wait until Santa Claus arrives.
3. Pegasus is a winged horse.
4. Sherlock Holmes did not live at 10 Downing Street
5. God doesn’t exist.
6. Jack the Ripper may have been a nobleman.
7. Hesperus is Phosphorous
8. Jona was swallowed by a whale.

Meinong (inspired by Brentano) distinguished between subsistence and existence (I forget which is which). So the Fountain of Youth, for example, has a sort of intentional inexistence which can make it the object of thought (can make (1) meaningful) without committing ourselves to the actual existence of such a fountain. I suppose Dennett’s point here is that language permits us to argue about God without necessarily committing ourselves to God’s existence and without each of us necessarily using the term ‘God’ in exactly the same way.

(3) Doxastic Division of Labor

More lessons from the philosophy of language. While ideally we should say what we mean and mean what we say, and know the exact meaning of every word we use, in practice we get by with a sort of partial understanding of many terms. Start with a rather simple case: we know (I know) that beeches and elms are sorts of trees but may not be able to distinguish one from another. Think next of terms from medicine, chemistry and physics—we often have some familiarity with these terms but have great difficulty explaining just what they mean, how they differ from one another, and the underlying theory from which their meanings derive. This is not unusual. There are many crafts and many sorts of experts; when something important rests on terminological distinctions, we turn to the relevant experts. Hillary Putnam referred to this practice as the “linguistic division of labor” and used it to argue against the idea that meanings and beliefs “are in the head,” i.e., fixed by what an individual knows apart from the community and environment in which he is embedded.

Dennett points out that while we can be credited with fully understanding a sentence only if know the proposition which it expresses, we can often have good reasons for believing that a sentence is true though we only have a vague sense of what it means (see discussion of Feynman 218-20) and, in the extreme, may even have good reason to believe a sentence is true without having any understanding of the sentence at all (217).

Now it may seem that as far as they lay person is concerned

1. e = mc2 (or pick any statement of QED)
2. God exists (or God is great)

are on the same footing. In both cases we have only a vague sense of what the expressions mean but nonetheless have faith that the sentences express truths, where that faith rests on those who are experts in the relevant fields. Dennett argues that in fact there is a big difference between these two cases. He’s willing to cede responsibility to experts in (1) because they really do understand the formulas and methods that they use, something which is brought out by how well their calculations accord with experimental results. This contrasts with (2), where the relevant experts insist on the fundamental incomprehensibility of God and, presumably, can offer no connection with how their words connect with any intersubjectively accessible evidence. Or as Dennett puts it later in the chapter

There is a big difference between religious faith and scientific faith: what has driven the changes in concepts in physic is not just heightened skepticism from an increasingly worldly and sophisticated clientele, but a tidal wave of exquisitely detailed positive results—the sorts of borne-out predictions that Feynman pointed to in defending his field. And this makes a huge difference because it gives beliefs about the truths of physics a place where the rubber meets the road, where there is more than mere professing that can be done (233).

(4) Pascal’s Wager or Does Anyone Really Believe in God?


Recall that Pascal did not proffer his wager as an argument for the existence of God (contrary to Descartes, Pascal thought this is something which could not be proved by reason) but rather as an argument for why one ought to want to believe in the existence of God, why one should seek to become a believer. Clearly wanting to believe and believing are distinct, and the question arises as to how one can come to believe if reason offers no guide. Here Pascal advises that all one can do is behave as if one did believe (e.g., by rejecting worldly pleasures, partaking in religious rituals, professing belief) and, with God’s grace, one may someday come to believe. Except for the bit about God’s grace, I assume this is Dennett’s view about how one in fact comes to acquire religious beliefs.

Dennett points out two problems for such an account. The first question concerns what it means to say someone believes in God. That is, what would show that someone actually believed in the existence of God rather than was simply going through the motions (profession) in the hope that (with God’s grace) he’d come to believe? The problem here is that the only way one can manifest one’s belief in God, transubstantiation, etc, is via profession (where in science there is at least the possibility of demonstrating one’s belief by reason or experimentation). Note the problem is not just one about knowing whether someone else believes in God, it’s a question about one’s own belief. So perhaps the answer is that one becomes a believer when one stops asking questions about whether one believes. (223)

The second problem Dennett raises concerns what it mean to say someone believes in God given that we each may have our own understanding of God. This would seem to undercut a public use of the expression ‘God’ but Dennett astutely observes that the “robustness of religion” doesn’t depend on uniformity of belief but rather on the uniformity of profession. (224-25)

In section 5, Dennett goes on to point out that there are doctrines the faithful are required to profess even though they may not be understood, and Roy Rappaport is quoted as noting that “If postulates are to be unquestionable, it is important that they be incomprehensible” (cited 229). Dawkins sees the drift to incomprehensibility as a sort of "inflation of credal athleticism” which actually enhances the fitness of the meme for faith by (i) drawing attention to itself by invoking wonder, (ii) discouraging paraphrase in favor of verbatim transmission, and (iii) discouraging rational inquiry; together these features enable the meme to exhibit a frequency-dependent fitness (in which it flourishes best in environment of rationalistic memes). (229-31)