Tag Archive for philosophy-of-religion at Illusive Mind

Tag Archive for 'philosophy-of-religion'

The eventuality of Utilitarianism: “You dodgy bastard God”

Published at February 6, 2006 in philosophy. 1 Comment

Buddhist morality seems to me to be an entirely utilitarian affair. That is, once one realizes that life is suffering and all human beings suffer, the right course of action is to alleviate suffering and replace it with the good: happiness. The good in this case being a specific spiritual happiness as oppose to the tradition material and physical conceptions of happiness common in Utilitarian theory.

Now the problem of Utilitarianism has always been in my view finding the method to best maximize the good. You might work very hard to make a large number of people happy only to find that in doing so you have made an even larger group of people unhappy. Or you just could have simply set off a chain of events which results in the whole earth being destroyed to make way for a intergalactic hyperspace bypass. Whoops.

However, the Mahayana Buddhists have the answer and what I would regard to be the only answer to this problem which would give someone any hope of redeeming this dangerous ethical theory:

Omniscience.

That’s right. The only way you can effectively (and safely) maximize the happiness of all sentient beings is to know everything, especially the exact effects your actions will cause.

The only person you could really trust to be a utilitarian is an omniscient being after all. When someone is performing all manner of ghastly and counter-intuitive acts such as running people over with trains and killing people for their organs and they say, “Don’t worry, it’s all for the best”, you really wanna be sure about that.

So this seems to be the justification for a whole lot of monks removing themselves from the world and sitting still in a monastery for a few decades. As utilitarians dedicated to helping the suffering of all, they’re trying damn to become omniscient.

Of course, such actions are only justifiable if you believe becoming omniscient is actually possible. If not, I think you just stay way from ‘the ends justifies the means’ theories in general.

It is worth noting that the Judeo-Christian God is often given a pass for all the obvious evil and suffering in the world because he has a ‘grand plan’ and being omniscient we have every reason to trust that it will work out in the end. That all this, blood, sweat and tears are not shed in vain. (Can’t wait to find out how the Holocaust was necessary to the great cosmic game!)

However, this tends to neglect the fact that this god is a professed believe in moral absolutes, I mean we’re talking about written in stone, literally! I mean if killing innocent people is part of the grand plan, that’s all well and good, but you might want to revise your own rules and regulations there Yaweh! You’re not living up to your own standards and by your own definition down live up to being ‘good’ and since God being good is part of your definition as an entity you have just contradicted yourself out of existence.

Apologists can of course counter that this too is part of the plan. That we should act in accordance with his moral absolutes whilst he goes on killing and causing all manner of suffering to fulfil the grand plan. By this stage though there seems to be nothing which can’t be explained by the ‘grand plan’ scenario which renders the explanation the equivalent of, “stop asking questions, just trust me!” (At least that’s what the priest said to me.)

But let us for the moment suppose that this is right. It is now somehow good to lie and murder, because god is good and this is what god does, and yet it is wrong to do these things, god said so. In any case such a dodgy character can clearly be up to no good and it is hardly worth worshiping a lying murderer. But then that was probably part of the plan all along.

Suspending Belief

Published at January 4, 2005 in philosophy. 1 Comment

Following on from my previous post: “I believe, not” the question is asked “how does one go about refraining from belief?”

Note that thanks to Richard’s comment I am distinguishing between two types of beliefs, those that are a matter of trusting or placing confidence in something “I believe it is warm” and being convinced of the truth of something “I believe the world exists”. The former I call, ideas, thoughts, and notions. The later I call beliefs.

The easiest thing to construe first up is that refraining from believing is believing in nothing. But this is clearly different, just as the strong atheist believes in the non-existence of God and the weak atheist refrains from believing anything about God.

A chap named Arcesilaus came up against the same problem. Arcesilaus was the sixth head of Plato’s academy and was a skepticist. Arcesilaus primarily attacked the Stoics for relying on sense impressions for knowledge in creating various systems of metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. According to the Stoics a wise person would never assent to anything that is uncertain, Arcesilaus said that you could never tell if your senses were completely accurate or not and as such a wise person should never assent to anything.

Some say that by arguing for this kind of skepticism Arcesilaus abandoned Platonism. However, In the apology of Socrates by Plato, Socrates says:

I will endeavor to explain to you the reason why I am called wise and have such an evil fame I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him,’ Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.’

Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him, his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom first among I selected for examination, and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and because I heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away:

conceit of Man, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him

Arcesilaus goes further by saying not that he knows that he knows nothing because if he knows nothing he knows nothing at all.

Arcesilaus often refuted the arguments of the Stoics by providing reasonable explanations for both sides, establishing aporia (perhaps in a Derridian fashion) and thus suggesting that the only wise action was epoche, the suspension of belief or mental commitment to either or any view, i.e. refraining from belief.

The Stoics thought that without knowledge of something there can be no basis upon which to act. Much like having ‘foundational beliefs’ in order to play the game at all.

The skeptics challenge this by saying that we act upon the appearance of reality not the truth of reality and admitting this does not preclude men from continuing to act on such appearances, that “Men naturally seek what appears good and avoid what
appears bad; in this sense they follow nature as their guide.” Custom or tradition can also be the basis of action or decision, as customs can be observed at the level of appearance and followed without a mental conviction or belief. “It is on this basis, for instance, that the skeptic performs acts of piety and avoids impiety. Thus Cotta, the Academic spokesman in Cicero’s De natura deorum, insists that he may be a philosophical skeptic and still participate in the traditional Roman religion”

Arcesilaus goes further by suggesting that such skepticism need not be reduced to what we might today call Nihilism by virtue of eulogon. Eulogon is the reasonable, so we may perform actions for which reasonable defence may be given. It is not contrary to skepticism according to Arcesilaus to use as one’s guide the actions any reasonable man would do.

I think that these are reasonable methods of making decisions and acting in the face of skepticism, or whilst refraining from belief. These were criticised by the early skeptics however, by the proponents of Pyrrhonism.

Pyrrhonians disagreed that these kinds of reasonable or probable standards for action or knowledge are required. They argue that the path of skepticism is maintaining epoche, the state in which you neither affirm nor deny anything in hope of attaining ataraxia. Ataraxia is the state of tranquillity, calmness, mental and emotional disquiet supposed to be achieved from letting go of the human need to believe in truths about the world. Pyrrho (B.C. 360-270) coined the term Acatalepsia, which means it is impossible to know things in their own nature, thus the validity of not only the senses but of the objective world could not be verified. (Much like Kant’s noumenal reality).

Does this mean Pyrrhonians sat under Bhodi trees refraining from judgement of the world whilst calmly meditating their lives away? No, they too like the Academic Skeptics of Arcesilaus supposed that you can act upon the senses and upon reason so long as you don’t infer from ‘it seems or feels x” to “it is x”.

I think it is right to “act as if” the world is known and the truths are real, however this is a far cry from “suppose that” or “think as if” my sense are infallible receptors of the truth. To me this means, admitting skepticism does not mean abandoning science by denying empiricism. It does not mean that you should give up doing what you think is right, and being ‘ethical’. It does mean giving up thinking your perspective is privileged, that you are right, and that you know the truth.

How can these things be compatible? Well that is most definitely the subject of another post, however I will say that there are many ways of deciding actions or making scientific progress without believing in an objective existence. Consensus reality, for one.

I would like to make further studies into the similarities and connections between early skepticism and post-modernism and also eastern philosophy. Pyrrho is generally attributed as the founder of skepticism, (a precursor to Academic Skepticism).

“He took part in the Indian expedition of Alexander the Great, and met with philosophers of the Indus region. Back in Greece he was frustrated with the assertions of the Dogmatists (those who claimed to possess knowledge), and founded a new school in which he taught that every object of human knowledge involves uncertainty. Thus, he argued, it is impossible ever to arrive at the knowledge of truth.”

I would not be surprised to learn that the whole movement has its roots in Indian philosophy. Some of the core ideas of Zen Buddhism bear striking resemblance to the practices of Epoche and Ataraxia.

Upon googling +epoche and +zen I found a journal article by Philip J. Bossert in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy called:

PARADOX AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN ZEN DIALOGUE AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION

“In a recent article in this journal, Dr Chung-ying Cheng discussed the seemingly paradoxical use of language in Zen dialogues and suggested a means for understanding this paradoxical quality. The “principle of ontic non-commitment” and the method of “ontological reduction” which he described as an approach to resolving the paradoxical qualities of Zen language appear to me to be quite similar to the phenomenological technique of epoche and the method of phenomenological reduction which the German philosopher Edmund Husserl developed early in this century to deal with certain paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity”

I for one think that Eastern philosophy has been remarkably overlooked in understanding the intricacies of post-modernism and post-structuralism. Though perhaps not entirely due to ethnocentrism but due to the bizarre manner in which writings on Zen for instance appear to the western academic.

From On Zen (Ch’an) Language and Zen Paradoxes

By Chung-Ying Cheng
Journal of Chinese Philosophy

“Zen (meditation school; Ch’an in Chinese) as a form of Chinese Buddhistic religion and proto-philosophy seems to be constantly puzzling and persistently inscrutable to modern philosophers in the Western world. Even philosophers of religion with the most broad-minded approach to religion do not seem to be able to make intelligible and intellectual sense of Zen thinking and Zen practice.”

In the midst of studying continental philosophy of the likes of Saussure, Foucault and Derrida, imagine my amazement when perusing Wikipedia and finding the entry on Shunyata :
“Shunyata signifies the nonsubstantiality or lack of essential nature of everything one encounters in life. (i.e., that everything is empty of substance, being, soul, essence, etc.) Everything is inter-related, never self-sufficient or independent; nothing has independent reality”

I don’t know by how many centuries this Indian term predates the writings of those philosophers, but I am looking forward to finding out.

I believe, not

Published at January 3, 2005 in philosophy. 4 Comments

I haven’t posted in awhile, primarily due to a judo injury that has caused me some discomfort. I was thrown (quite slowly) and as a result landed and rolled quite slowly over my right shoulder, during which I dislocated my AC joint.

In light of the recent Tsunami disaster there has been a lot of renewed discussion of how the notion of a good, omnipotent, interventionist god can be reconciled with natural disasters, or natural evil.

I took a philosophy of religion subject, during which I became a devout atheist, mostly because of the problem of evil. You see, if God were good then he wouldn’t want evil in the world (i.e. innocent people suffering) and if he is omnipotent (which traditional theists suppose he is) then he can prevent evil. If evil exists, then a good, omnipotent god does not.

In 1710, Leibniz invented the term “theodicy”. A theodicy is an argument that seeks to reconcile the existence of evil and god. The most compelling theodicy to my mind is the ‘free will’ theodicy, at least it was the one I was taught in school growing up as a catholic. That is, evil exists only as a product of human will, were god to prevent it he would remove a greater good, the good of free will.

What does this have to do with Tsunamis? Well in 1979 William L. Rowe published a paper in the American Philosophical Quarterly 16, called The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism. He suggests the existence of ‘natural evils’ that is evils that exist without any connection to human free will. An earthquake occurs, triggering a Tsunami killing over a hundred thousand people, many woman and children. Unless living by the coast is a sin, these people would have been killed regardless of any wrong doing by people. These are evils that a good and omnipotent can and should prevent because the removal of which would pose no threat to the existence of free will.

If you find this argument compelling like I did, then you probably have reason to doubt the existence of god. Maybe you a cold hearted rationalist, maybe you had religion thrust upon you as a child and you have an affinity for rebellion. If you are unmoved by this argument then you are most likely a snooty philosopher with a better one or a person of faith. Maybe you have felt God in your heart or you have been taught to have faith no matter what tempts you. Regardless, at the end of the philosophy of religion subject I lost my atheism and found agnosticism, I saw that the people who walked into the first lecture held the same views at the last lecture. I saw that their beliefs were reinforced, no matter what. This is what this post is about.

I have spent a lot of time in philosophy forums debating evolutionary theory against creationists and debating God against theists. It was fun and I actually ruined a few people and became quite disgustingly arrogant and righteous in the process. Mostly though nothing changed. I pointed to flaws in their reasoning that I found compelling and they did the same, though more often than not they denied my reasoning by providing ‘evidence’ and sometimes counterexamples.

I later came to realise, (or at least suppose) that beliefs are self reinforcing. You arrive in the world empty, something happens and you construct a belief, you then seek for evidence to support your belief and so it happens that the world starts to emerge and look just as you imagine it would, because you play the principal role as editor, choosing what information you accept and how you filter your reality.

This is not a closed loop, people are able to change their minds, I know I have. But for the most part they don’t. My change of heart can be seen simply as constructing a new belief that contradicts old ones, that is a belief in scepticism, and a belief in open mindedness.

If you view beliefs in the way I have described it becomes quite difficult to have an open mind. How can you view other ideas, if it is from the vantage point of a reality constructed by opposing concepts. If you believe in truth, then you can never hope to find it if you are simply ‘locked in’ to the idea that you have held for most of your life.

I’m not specifically talking about God, this applies to every form of belief. Beliefs about human nature, about reality, about truth, about everything. I have come to believe in not having beliefs at all. Some people will read that and think that I have settled for some wimpy ‘it’s all to hard’ agnosticism and others may see some value in what I am writing. Depends on your vantage point, doesn’t it? Where you’ve come from.

A belief is a mental acceptance, a conviction in the truth of something. Once you have such a conviction about anything you are liable to be blind to the alternatives. However if you have a notion, idea or concept of something, you are unattached, unconvinced and open to the possibility of possibility.

If you combine this with the idea that truth is unattainable then you arrive first and foremost at the ‘fortasse’ the perhaps. The realm in which any theory is possible, and all that determines your reactions to them are your preconceptions. It is not easy, but I also freely admit that this notion may be completely wrong and the best thing to do is have beliefs. To be open minded, you must first doubt yourself. I think that perhaps this is where all philosophy starts, but then as you wander you find ideas you like and you can loose this, and so you have eternal debates of belief where each opponent is unwilling and unable to see the world from another vantage point. That reduces philosophy to a faith of logic.

So sneer if you will at those who are desperately trying to reconcile their beliefs about God with the suffering in the world today. Perhaps anyone who thinks they are in possession of the truth are the greatest fools of all and those who are prepared to doubt their convictions are those with courage.