Realism and Anti-Realism in Religion and Morality

Posted by Chris Lyons on 9 August 2008 | 2 Comments

Tags: Religion

In his book ‘God In Us’, Anthony Freeman declared that, though he no longer believed in God, he thought there was considerable benefit to be had from living as though he still did. So he says, “Yes, I do believe in God, and one of the things I believe about God is that he does not exist.” There’s a little sophistry here, as he’s giving the word ‘God’ two different meanings in the same sentence. The God he doesn’t believe in is the traditional Christian one, who created the universe, is infinite in all his perfections and intervenes in the world on behalf of his human creatures. The God he continues to believe in is simply the sum total of his own highest values. He adds though that he “still find(s) value in the Christian vocabulary, including the word God, and in the Christian stories, especially those of Jesus.”

In a recent article for The New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple said the following:

If I think that man is no more than a physico-chemical being, or at any rate that there is no firm reason to think that he is, why do I nonetheless think that his inanimate remains ought to be treated with reverence? The answer exposes the reason why rationality is not enough in human life.

We have to live as if some things were sacred......The precise boundaries of the sacred are always disputable, but we cannot do without an awareness of the sacred, even when we know that sacredness is not a natural quality, that it is not just ‘there’ in the way that natural qualities such as weight and density are, that it does not inhere as a natural quality of anything, that it is imposed upon the world by us in a way that other qualities are not. And that is part of the reason why a purely scientific attitude to life is both undesirable and impossible. (http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/23724/sec_id/23724)

These are two examples of philosophical anti-realism – taking very seriously something which has no real existence. For Freeman, his highest ideals and values, he dubs ‘God’. Dalrymple calls them ‘The Sacred’. But is anything added by re-naming our highest values in this way? I would contend not. Our highest values and ideals are just that. Re-naming them as something else is likely to be confusing to others, who hold an understanding of the original meaning of these words, and maybe even to ourselves, once we have forgotten about the re-naming and begin to give our thoughts more authority than they merit. But sacralising or deifying our individual or collective feelings also has other dangers.

Leon Cass, a Bush advisor, wrote an influential essay titled ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ in which he said:

We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

He doesn’t go so far here as to sacralize or deify ‘repugnance’, but, in placing it above reason as the ultimate criterion for right action, he already goes too far. Steven Pinker answers him:

There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

In his book, Moral Minds, Marc Hauser claims that we have an innate moral sense which is analogous to our language sense. So just as (as Chomsky maintains) we are born with a sense of ‘universal grammar’ which leads us to unconsciously analyse speech in terms of its grammatical structure, so we also seem to have a sense of ‘moral grammar’ by which we unconsciously analyse human behaviour in terms of its moral structure. This isn’t just a philosophical claim, however, but a hypothesis supported by data.

Steven Pinker, in his paper, The Moral Instinct (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=print), expands upon this idea. He contends that we have a biologically based moral sense, but that it frequently isn’t rational. He argues for a form of Moral Realism, which is the idea that, having been born with a rudimentary moral sense, we are capable of discovering more complex moral truths, in a way analogous to that by which mathematical truths are found. So just as by understanding the concept of two, and the concept of four, and the concept of addition, we are compelled to accept that 2 + 2 = 4, we likewise, by building upon our rudimentary moral sense, are forced to some conclusions and not others. This suggests that moral truths aren’t to be found just in the brains of individuals, but out there in the world, and he gives two reasons for supposing why this might be so. The first is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games, whereby two parties are better off if they both act non-selfishly than if each acts selfishly. The second is a feature of rationality itself. “I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.” This is the idea of the interchangeability of perspectives and it is, of course, the basis of the Golden Rule in all its guises. The idea of Moral Realism claims, therefore, that the moral sense isn’t just a feature of brain wiring and isn’t dictated by a supernatural power, but is just in the nature of things. As such, it is susceptible to being understood by a science of the moral sense, the goal of which would be to allow us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have brought about to find goals that we can all share and defend.

To my mind, this is a far more valuable approach. Far better, I think, to more deeply understand our highest ideals and values, than to merely sacralise or deify them.

Dr Chris Lyons