I hope Professor Faith has done justice to this theme, which I have often encountered in discussion. I am not at all persuaded by it. There is a big difference between religious faith and scientific faith: what has driven the changes in concepts in physics is not just heightened skepticism from an increasingly worldly and sophisticated clientele, but a tidal wave of exquisitely detailed positive resultsâthe 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. For instance, you can build something that depends for its safe operation on the truth of those sentences and risk your life trying to fly it to the moon. Like the folk religionistsâ beliefs that they should sacrifice a goat or that they are invulnerable to arrows, these are beliefs that you can act on in ways that speak louder than words. People who give away all their belongings and climb to some mountaintop in anticipation of the imminent End of the World donât just believe in belief in God, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, when it comes to religious convictions.
6 Lessons from Lebanon: the strange cases of the Druze and Kim Philby
There is still more that is systematically curious about the phenomenon that people call religious belief but that might better be called religious professing. This is a feature that has long captivated me, while further persuading me that Humeâs project of natural religion (evaluating arguments for and against the existence of God) is largely wasted effort. My interest in this feature grew out of two experiences, both of which involve events that took place in Lebanon more than forty years ago (though that is a sheer coincidence, so far as I know). I spent some of my earliest days in Beirut, where my father, a historian of Islam, was cultural attaché (and a spy for the OSS). The rhythm of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the nearby minaret was my everyday experience, along with my teddy bear and toy trucks, and the beautifully haunting call never fails to send chills through me when I hear it today. But I left Beirut when I was only five, and didnât return until 1964, when I visited my mother and sister, who were living there then. We spent some time in the mountains outside Beirut in a village that was mostly Druze, with some Christians and Muslims thrown in. I asked some of the non-Druze residents of the town to tell me about the Druze religion, and this is what they said:
Oh, the Druze are a very sad lot. The first principle of the Druze religion is to lie to outsiders about their beliefsânever tell the truth to an infidel! So you shouldnât take anything a Druze tells you as authoritative. Some of us think, in fact, that the Druze used to have a holy book, their own scripture, but they lost it, and they are so embarrassed by this that they make up all manner of solemn nonsense to keep this from coming out. You will notice that the women donât participate at all in the Druze ceremonies; thatâs because they couldnât keep such a secret!
I heard this tale from several people who claimed to know, and I also heard it denied by a few Druze, of course. But if it was true, this would create a dilemma for any anthropologist: the usual method of questioning informants would be a hopeless wild-goose chase, and if he made the ultimate sacrifice and converted to Druze himself so as to gain entrance to the inner sanctum, he would have to admit that we on the outside shouldnât believe his scholarly treatise, What the Druze Really Believe, since it was written by a devout Druze (and everybody knows that the Druze lie). As a young philosopher, I was fascinated by this real-life version of the liar paradox (Epimenides the Cretan says that all Cretans are liars; does he speak the truth?), and also by the unmistakable echoes of another famous example in philosophy: Ludwig Wittgensteinâs beetle in the box. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein says:
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a âbeetle.â No one can look into anyone elseâs box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.âHere it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.âBut suppose the word âbeetleâ had a use in these peopleâs language?âIf so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.âNo, one can âdivide throughâ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. [Section 293]
Much has been written on Wittgensteinâs beetle box, but I donât know if anybody has ever proposed an application to religious belief. In any case, it seems fantastic at first that the Druze might be an actual example of the phenomenon. Am I just inflating a mean-spirited calumny of the Druze by their neighbors to make a dubious philosophical point? Perhaps, but consider what Scott Atran has to say about his attempts, as an anthropologist, to write about the beliefs of the Druze:
As a graduate student almost three decades ago, I spent some years with the Druze people of the Middle East. I wanted to learn about their religious beliefs, which appeared to weave together ideas from all the great monotheistic faiths in intriguing ways. Learning about Druze religion is a gradual process in the Socratic tradition, involving interpretation of parables in question-and-answer format. Although, as a non-Druze, I could never be formally initiated into the religion, the elders seemed to delight in my trying to understand the world as they conceived it. But every time I reached some level of awareness about a problem, Druze elders reminded me that anything said or learned beyond that point could not be discussed with uninitiated persons, including other Druze. I never did write on Druze religion and wound up with a thesis on the cognitive bases of science. [2002, p. ix]
It seems that we still donât know what the Druze really believe. We may begin to wonder if they themselves know. And we may also begin to wonder if it matters, which brings me to my second lesson from Lebanon.
In 1951, Kim Philby, a senior officer in the British intelligence service (SIS), fell under suspicion of being a double agent, a highly placed traitor working for the Soviet KGB. A secret tribunal was held by SIS, but Philby was found not guilty on the evidence presented. Although SIS had been unable to convict him, they quite reasonably refused to reinstate him to his most sensitive position, and he resigned, and moved to Lebanon, to work as a journalist. In 1963, a Soviet defector to London confirmed Philbyâs double-agent role, and when the SIS went to Beirut to confront him, he fled to Moscow, where he spent the remainder of his life, working for the KGB.
Or did he? When Philby first showed up in Moscow, he was (apparently) suspected by the KGB of being a British plantâa triple agent, if you like. Was he, in fact? For years a story circulated in intelligence circles to this effect. The idea was that when SIS âexoneratedâ Philby in 1951, they found a brilliant way of dealing with their delicate problem of trust:
Congratulations, Kim, old chap! We always thought you were loyal to our cause. And for your next assignment, we would like you to pretend to resign from SISâbitter over our failure to reinstate you fully, donât you seeâand move to Beirut and take up a position as a journalist in exile. In due course we intend to give you reason to âfleeâ to Moscow, where you will eventually be appreciated by your comrades because you can spill a lot of relatively innocuous insider information you already know, and weâll provide you with carefully controlled further gifts of intelligenceâand disinformationâthat the Russians will be glad to accept, even when they have their doubts. Once youâre in their good graces, weâd like you to start telling us everything you can about what theyâre up to, what questions they ask you, and so forth.
Once SIS had given Philby this new assignment, their worries were over. It just didnât matter whether he was truly a British patriot pretending to be a disgruntled agent, or truly a loyal Soviet agent pretending to be a loyal British agent (pretending to be a disgruntled agent
â¦). He would behave in exactly the same ways in either case; his activities would be interpretable and predictable from either of two mirror-image intentional-stance profiles. In one, he deeply believes that the British cause is worth risking his life for, and in the other, he deeply believes that he has a golden opportunity to be a hero of the Soviet Union by pretending that he deeply believes that the British cause is worth risking his life for, and so on. The Soviets, meanwhile, would no doubt draw the same inference and not bother trying to figure out if Philby was really a double agent or a triple agent or a quadruple agent. Philby, according to this story, had been deftly turned into a sort of human telephone, a mere conduit of information that both sides could exploit for whatever purposes they could dream up, relying on him to be a high-fidelity transmitter of whatever information they gave him, without worrying about where his ultimate loyalties lay.
In 1980, when Philbyâs standing with his overseers in Moscow was improving (apparently), I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford, and another Visiting Fellow at the time happened to be Sir Maurice Oldfield, the retired head of MI6, the agency responsible for counterespionage outside Great Britain, and one of the spymasters responsible for Philbyâs trajectory. (Sir Maurice was the model for Ian Flemingâs âMâ in the James Bond novels.) One night, after dinner, I asked him whether this story I had heard was true, and he replied quite testily that it was a lot of rubbish. He wished people would just let poor Philby live out his days in Moscow in peace and quiet. I replied that I was pleased to get his answer, but we both had to recognize that it was also what he would have told me had the story been true! Sir Maurice glowered and said nothing.14
These two stories illustrate in extreme form the fundamental problem faced by anyone intent on studying religious beliefs. It has been noted by many commentators that typical, canonical religious beliefs cannot be tested for truth. As I suggested earlier, this is as good as a defining characteristic of religious creeds. They have to be âtaken on faithâ and are not subject to (scientific, historical) confirmation. But, more than that, for this reason and others, religious-belief expressions cannot really be taken at face value. The anthropologists Craig Palmer and Lyle Steadman (2004, p. 141) quote the lament of their distinguished predecessor the anthropologist Rodney Needham, who was frustrated in his work with the Penan, in interior Borneo:
I realized that I could not confidently describe their attitude to God, whether this was belief or anything elseâ¦. In fact, as I had glumly to conclude, I just did not know what was their psychic attitude toward the personage in whom I had assumed they believedâ¦. Clearly, it was one thing to report the received ideas to which a people subscribed, but it was quite another matter to say what was their inner state (belief for instance) when they expressed or entertained such ideas. If, however, an ethnographer said that people believed something when he did not actually know what was going on inside them, then surely his account of them must, it occurred to me, be very defective in quite fundamental ways. [Needham, 1972, pp. 1â2]
Palmer and Steadman take this recognition by Needham to signal the need for recasting anthropological theories as accounts of religious behavior, not religious belief: âWhile religious beliefs are not identifiable, religious behavior is, and this aspect of the human experience can be comprehended. What is needed is an explanation of this observable religious behavior that is restricted to what can be observedâ [p. 141]. They go on to say that Needham is virtually alone in realizing the profound implications of this fact about the inscrutability of religious avowal, but they themselves overlook the even more profound implication of it: the natives are in the same boat as Needham! They are just as unable to get into the inner minds of their kin and neighbors as Needham is.
When it comes to interpreting religious avowals of others, everybody is an outsider. Why? Because religious avowals concern matters that are beyond observation, beyond meaningful test, so the only thing anybody can go on is religious behavior, and, more specifically, the behavior of professing. A child growing up in a culture is like an anthropologist, after all, surrounded by informants whose professings stand in need of interpretation. The fact that your informants are your father and mother, and speak in your mother tongue, does not give you anything more than a slight circumstantial advantage over the adult anthropologist who has to rely on a string of bilingual interpreters to query the informants.15 (And think about your own case: werenât you ever baffled or confused about just what you were supposed to believe? You know perfectly well that you donât have privileged access to the tenets of the faith that you were raised in. I am just asking you to generalize the point, to recognize that others are in no better position.)
7 Does God exist?
If God did not exist, it would be necessary for us to invent Him.
âVoltaire
At long last I turn to the promised consideration of arguments for the existence of God. And, having reviewed the obstaclesâdiplomatic, logical, psychological, and tacticalâfacing anybody who wants to do this constructively, I will give just a brief birdâs-eye view of the domain of inquiry, expressing my own verdicts but not the reasoning that has gone into them, and providing references to a few pieces that may not be familiar to many. There is a spectrum of intentional objects to consider, ranging along the anthropomorphism scale from a Guy in the Sky to one Timeless Benign Force or another. And there is a spectrum of arguments, which line up only unevenly with the spectrum of Gods. We can begin with anthropomorphic Gods and the arguments from presumed historical documentation, such as this: according to the Bible, which is the literal truth, God exists, has always existed, and created the universe in seven days a few thousand years ago. The historical arguments are apparently satisfying to those who accept them, but they simply cannot be introduced into a serious investigation, since they are manifestly question-begging. (If this is not obvious to you, ask whether the Book of Mormon [1829] or the founding document of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbardâs book Dianetics [1950], should be taken as irrefutable evidence for the propositions it contains. No text can be conceded the status of âgospel truthâ without foreclosing all rational inquiry.)
That leaves us with the traditional arguments discussed at great length by the philosophers and theologians over the centuries, some empiricalâsuch as the Argument from Designâand some purely a priori or logicalâsuch as the Ontological Argument and the Cosmological Argument for the necessity of a First Cause.
The logical arguments are regarded by many thinkers, including many philosophers who have looked at them carefully for years, to be intellectual conjuring tricks or puzzles rather than serious scientific proposals. Consider the Ontological Argument, first formulated by Saint Anselm in the eleventh century as a direct response to Psalm 14:1, about what the fool said in his heart. If the fool understands the concept of God, Anselm claims, he should understand that God is (by definition) the greatest conceivable beingâor, in a famously mind-twisting phrase, the Being greater than which nothing can be conceived. But among the perfections such a greatest conceivable Being would have to have is existence, since if God lacked existence it would be possible to conceive of a still greater Beingânamely, God-with-all-His-perfections-plus-existence! A God that lacked existence would not be the Being greater than which nothing can be conceived, but that is the definition of God, so therefore God must exist. Do you find this compelling? Or do you suspect it is some sort of logical âtrick with mirrorsâ? (Could you use the same argument scheme to prove the existence of the most perfect ice-cream sundae conceivableâsince if it didnât exist there would be a more perfect conceivable one: namely, one that did exist?) If youâre suspicious, youâre in good company. Ever since Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, there has been a widespreadâbut by no means unanimousâconviction that you canât prove the existence of anything (other than an abstraction) by sheer logic. You can prov
e that there is a prime number larger than a trillion, and that there is a point at which the lines bisecting the three angles of any triangle all meet, and there is a âGödel sentenceâ for every Turing machine that is consistent and can represent the truths of arithmetic, but you canât prove that something that has effects in the physical world exists except by methods that are at least partly empirical.16 There are those who disagree, and continue to champion updated versions of Anselmâs Ontological Argument, but the price they pay (willingly, one gathers) for their access to purely logical proof is a remarkably bare and featureless intentional object. Even if a Being greater than which nothing can be conceived has to exist, as their arguments urge, it is a long haul from that specification to a Being that is merciful or just or lovingâunless you make sure to define it that way from the outset, introducing anthropomorphism by a dodge that will not persuade the skeptics, needless to say. Norâin my experienceâdoes it reassure the faithful.
The Cosmological Argument, which in its simplest form states that since everything must have a cause the universe must have a causeânamely, Godâdoesnât stay simple for long. Some deny the premise, since quantum physics teaches us (doesnât it?) that not everything that happens needs to have a cause. Others prefer to accept the premise and then ask: What caused God? The reply that God is self-caused (somehow) then raises the rebuttal: If something can be self-caused, why canât the universe as a whole be the thing that is self-caused? This leads in various arcane directions, into the strange precincts of string theory and probability fluctuations and the like, at one extreme, and into ingenious nitpicking about the meaning of âcauseâ at the other. Unless you have a taste for mathematics and theoretical physics on the one hand, or the niceties of scholastic logic on the other, you are not apt to find any of this compelling, or even fathomable.
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