That old-time religion is not a secure enough moral foundation for society's needs.
I’m continuing my reporting on the next installment from
Conservative Estimate, the recently founded website that is devoted to
demolishing Conservatism.
On Friday, Alfred George showed that, of the three sources of truth claimed by Religion (revelation, moral sentiments, and right reason), revelation is not adequate to form the basis for decent behavior in society.
Today, he considers the two remaining sources of truth and finds them both to be unreliable grounds for good behavior in society.
Let us mosey across the orange divide . . .
Mr. George begins by noting how much credence believers give to the “still, small voice” within them, and he grants them all possible deference for their belief:
They tend to consider this feeling or voice to be God’s, and so they regard it as having a similar sort of reliability as revelation. For the sake of this discussion, we will not contest the believer’s contention that God is trying to communicate with him. We will just show that, even if this is the case, the messages received by believers are insufficiently trustworthy to form the basis of societal norms.
He then goes on to show that this experience, even if valid, is highly variable:
Two individuals seeking guidance on the same issue may very well receive diametrically opposed feelings or advice. And this is the case even if each seeker believes that his channel of communication is clear.
But more often than not the channel is clogged by the various vices to which human beings are susceptible. Selfishness, greed, willful ignorance, thoughtlessness, and malevolence are just a handful of the innumerable sins that can block or distort the communication. And many of them hide just outside of awareness, so that the seeker cannot tell that the message has been garbled.
He concludes, therefore, that moral sentiments are
at best valid only for the person who receives them, and even then only with varying degrees on reliability.
Nothing with this sort of variability can provide the assurances of good behavior that society needs.
Next Mr. George also shows that the third religious source of truth, right reason, is also too unreliable for society to depend on. Most religions, he says, regard reason as a gift of God, and feel that, if it is acting optimally, it must arrive at the God’s honest truth:
[Reason’s] proper purpose is to discover truth. Since, as they see it, the truth cannot be different from God’s order, then, if the intellect is working properly, it will attain to God’s order. This is called right reason.
He then notes that religious believers also think that reason can be easily corrupted by selfishness and sin so that it fails to arrive at God’s truth. That is why they prefer to rely on moral sentiments, and most of all on revelation. Then he concludes:
Now believers are certainly correct in their claim that reason is susceptible to deformation. But they are wrong in thinking that revelation and moral sentiment are more reliable than reason in reaching truth, as we have seen over the past two posts.
On balance, considering the drawbacks of revelation and moral sentiment, reason is in fact the best available tool.
With all its inherent faults, reason at least does not fall back on violence, as does revelation. Neither is it riddled with highly personal and subjective interpretations, as is the case with moral sentiments.
Reason is an uncertain tool in the search for truth, but it is no more uncertain than revelation and moral sentiment. And it is much less violent and subjective.
The ultimate conclusion? Society cannot rely on Religion to ground the virtues and the decent behavior needed for smooth and secure social relations.
You can read the whole post here.
Tomorrw Mr. George will show that Religion’s claim to absolute moral truth is insupportable, and that not every political issue is essentially a religious question, as many fundamentalists believe.
I’ll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.