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Ethical Voices

Conversations on Belief

This conversation emerges following the December, 2007 CCEPA presentation at Saint Mary's University, entitled: Trust in Freedom to Express Belief.

On 12/23/07 10:22 AM, Mark Mercer wrote:

One issue between David and Kathleen on the one hand and me on the other is whether a secular society can be robustly pluralistic. I don't see why not; David and Kathleen have their doubts. Another issue between us is whether secularity unfairly puts religious ways of life at risk. I suspect that secularity does put religious ways of life at risk, but I don't see that it does so unfairly. (I think Jamal is with me on both these issues, but I'm not sure.)

I'm not sure I understand the main point David wanted to make in his keynote address, but I think a few of the claims he made along the way are false or wrongheaded.

Kathleen insists on the ordinariness of religious practices for the person of faith and says that in secular societies people of faith are required to see their practices as other than ordinary. I don't agree that secularity imposes this requirement. I also wonder why anyone would like to live as Kathleen says people of faith would like to live.

1) That we ought to value strongly for its own sake pluralism or multiculturalism follows directly, I think, from our commitments to freedom, equality, and decency. By freedom I mean the freedom to live the life we want to live. This freedom requires social and political protection of the freedoms of dress, worship, manners, expression, assembly, and movement-and of others as well, I'm sure. Our commitment to equality stems from our recognition that other people's pursuits and joys are just as important to them as ours are to us (and that their pain is just as awful to them as ours is to us). That recognition is expressed in our commitments to equality of opportunity and to providing everyone with what they need to support themselves. And so we support measures we think will ensure that people have health care, good housing, good policing, education or training, meaningful work at good wages, and a comfortable retirement. We are decent when we allow another person's pain or hardship to take precedence over our own mere discomfort or inconvenience. Decency requires that we do not horde for ourselves what will make others' lives better and that we contribute our resources to improving the lot of others rather than using them to indulge our small desires.

Our commitments to freedom and equality require that we do not interfere, at least not unfairly, with the choices others make or with their desires to identify with the groups or values with which they wish to identify; our commitment to decency requires that we actively support others in living how they wish. From freedom and equality alone we can come only to tolerance, which is not, I think Kathleen and David agree, the same as robust pluralism or multiculturalism. Our commitment to decency brings us from mere tolerance and a rather cold fairness to active participation in enabling people to live how they would like to live, even when they would like to live in ways we find silly or stupid or ignoble. Our commitment to decency raises two problems for us. The first is that a person's own individual decency will mean little or nothing if it is not part of community- or society-wide decency. I alone can do very little, while all or most of us together can do a lot. The second problem is that of judging where decency toward others becomes slavish self-denial. The solution to these problems lies in democracy. We democratically determine the level of support and protection to give ways of life that require support or protection and then democratically set levels of taxation and other burdens people must bear in order that we can provide that level of support and protection.

Secularity has two sides. The first is that no public office or role is open only to people of faith or of a particular faith (or, indeed, open only to people of any particular sort) and that no public office or role is controlled by religious authorities. The second is that public administrators not privilege religious purposes over other purposes in allocating public space, money, or other resources.

Now it seems to me that a secular society can be as robustly pluralistic as Kathleen would like. Indeed, our commitments to freedom, equality, decency, and democracy-commitments that, in the presence of different ways of life, imply support for pluralism or multiculturalism-require that no public offices be open to only to people of faith and that public administrators do not privilege religious purposes or sensibilities over other purposes and sensibilities. This protects people against officials imposing their preferred ways of life or mores on others.

A secular society need not be one in which people are under any pressure not to express their religious beliefs in public or to live openly in their religious ways. I agree with David and Kathleen that people ought not to feel any pressure to hide their religion. And I agree that in attempting not to exclude anyone, governments, schools, and other public institutions have often wronged religious people.

Kathleen and David were critical of the ideas of liberal tolerance and state neutrality toward different ways of life. Their complaint, I understand, is that really what's going on is that people are required to live according to specifically liberal values and virtues, at least in public. I think that there is more than a bit of truth in this complaint, but I think Kathleen and David overstate the problems. That we live in sovereign countries under one set of governments is our condition; even if one can think of better geographical and political arrangements, our present task is to find the best ways of living within our condition. It seems to me that representative democracy based on ridings consisting of contiguous areas is the best system possible in our condition. Universal health care and strong secular public education (I say no public funding of religious education) aimed (among other things) to create people who can look after themselves and a unitary justice system serve us well. I can't see what else would work to enable us to live together more or less peaceably and, indeed, to come together now and then to enjoy each other, or to promote the material prosperity needed to live well in any of the styles in which people in Canada seek to live. I endorse liberal values and virtues because they appeal to me directly in themselves-others, I think, have excellent reason to endorse them as fine instruments enabling them as they wish in our current condition-that is, as citizens of a sovereign state with one set of governments.

What other sets of values and virtues would work as well? So far, it seems to me, wherever public life has been marked by non-liberal values, we find fear and xenophobia, or the culture of complaint and victimization, or demagoguery or authoritarianism, or identity politics, or the brutalizing of individuals by the group. Consider, for instance, how far off track human rights commissions in Nova Scotia and Canada have got and what harm they have done. Loathe politicians though I do, I prefer them to community leaders and religious spokespersons, as at least politicians have a democratically generated mandate (though maybe that politicians should have a democratically generated mandate is another idea whose time has passed).

I might here be charged with committing an error parallel to the error I think David and Kathleen make. David and Kathleen note that our society is moderately secular and note also that some religious people have sometimes found it hard to honour their religious traditions in public, and then blame secularity for these hardships. I note that in the absence of structures informed by liberal values we find lots of awful things and conclude that it is the absence of these structures that's to blame. The problems David and Kathleen note, though, are problems stemming from a ham-fisted attempt not to exclude anyone or not to privilege any one tradition, and not ones stemming from secularity, while the problems I note are exactly the problems competition for resources causes when that competition is not structured by fair and impartial procedures.

2) Secularity puts religious ways of life at risk, but it does not do so unfairly. It puts religious ways of life at risk just as it puts all ways of life at risk-by offering people options and by protecting their act of abandoning one way of life in favour of another. In a secular society, no one is required to profess any particular religion or, indeed, any religion at all. Those who would use force against the apostate will be treated as criminals. We atheists are free to speak publicly against religion and against being religious and we are free to live publicly, for all to see, without religion. If religion, or a religion, cannot hold its own in a fair competition, too bad for it; religion, or that religion, will die out and no one will have been wronged.

I would like that religion disappear as people come to see that religious beliefs are false (or at least ill supported) and that religious attitudes are unattractive. That we can have art and culture and science and politics and fellow-feeling and all the rest without religion should, I hope, cause people to become less and less religious. I don't think there would be anything unfair in religion disappearing as a result of such causes.

3) David holds that all argument or justification is argument or justification within a system of rules and standards and concludes from this that any justification of a way of life or of the beliefs or values basic to that way of life must beg the question against incommensurable ways of life or beliefs or values. I think that that is right. But I don't think the person of faith can properly take any comfort from this result. The main problem with religious beliefs is that all arguments for their truth fail by the believer's own standards. It's not a case of alternative logics or different standards of evidence or of beginning from contrary premises. No argument that there exists a fit object of worship goes even a smidgen in the direction of establishing its conclusion-and this according to a logic and to standards of evidence that people of faith themselves accept.

Now one can, of course, just deny that argument has anything to do with it. One just knows, by a miracle (Hume tells us), that Christ is our saviour. Or, perhaps, one can just deny that what we call religious beliefs are actually beliefs-they are some other sort of attitude. Or one can argue for the goodness of being religious from the benefits that being religious brings.

It's here, I think, that we find the phenomenon of incommensurability. Some people are happy to believe without reason or evidence or to have religious attitudes (that aren't beliefs); some people are not; there can be no argument in favour of one of these ways of life that doesn't beg the question against the other. But of course that is not the end of the matter. We can, through little local arguments and lots of experiments, try on the way of life we reject (at least a bit of it, a bit of it at a time) to see how it suits us. We might come to see that it suits us better than we thought it would; we might even find that we have been converted to it. We might, as I think is the case with at least a few religious believers, come to find our religion silly but, sadly, feel unable to loosen its hold on us.

David said, I think I remember, that atheists are just as much people of faith as anyone is. This is either false or trivial. Now it might be true of one or another atheist that she accepts this or that on faith, but it need not be true of all atheists. We atheists who are entirely without faith accept a great lot of propositions as assumptions or presuppositions or hypotheses or gambles. Now if accepting a proposition as an assumption or a presupposition or a hypothesis or a gamble is to accept it on faith, then David's contention is trivial. But if faith is something different from all of those (or from any one of them), then David's contention is interesting but false.

David mentioned in connection with the idea that atheists are people of faith the claim that slavery is wrong. David said that however deeply and sincerely an atheist might believe that slavery is wrong, she cannot show by argument that it is wrong. I agree, but I don't think that that shows that the atheist's belief is held on faith. We need not accept that "slavery is wrong" expresses a belief. (If it expresses a belief, it expresses a false belief, as also does "slavery is not always wrong.") Were I to say "slavery is wrong," I would be expressing my disapproval of slavery or my repugnance toward it or my commitment to stand against slavery; I wouldn't be expressing a belief. But I don't think I would say "slavery is wrong," for I fear I would be misunderstood. I would say that slavery causes terrible hardship and suffering to people, that it is a relationship in which people manifest contempt toward others, and that the slave is denied the ability to choose her path for herself. Those beliefs are the grounds of my disapproval of slavery and my commitment to stand against slavery. I need not believe that slavery is wrong in order to have good grounds on which to disapprove of it or to stand against it.

Or "slavery is wrong" is just a way of summarizing points such as those I made above, not a conclusion drawn from them. Or it's an assumption or a gamble...

4) With Kathleen, I would like our society to be robustly pluralistic. But I see no reason to think secularity is the enemy of robust pluralism. On the contrary, I think it necessary (though not sufficient) for pluralism. So, unlike Kathleen, I do not contrast the goal of having a secular society with that of having a pluralistic society. I'm still in the dark why one would contrast them, why one would think secularity gets in the way of pluralism.

Secularity does not require religious people to couch their reasons for advocating one or another policy or programme in non-religious terms. Nor does it demand individual sincerity. Maybe I just haven't yet seen why Kathleen says what she says about the demands secularity puts on religious people. Perhaps a few examples would help me. I'm sure Kathleen is right that religious people will have to adapt their traditions in one way or another if they are effectively to participate socially or politically in a multicultural (and, thereby, secular) society (or, indeed, if they are to live happily at all). But they are free to make whatever accommodations to their condition of living in a politically unified pluralistic society that they want to make. And they don't have to leave their arguments at the door or to mutter them only under their breath.

That someone wants to X is in itself a reason for me not to interfere in her Xing and, indeed, to help her to find opportunities to X. It's not necessarily an overriding reason-I can ask what her Xing or her having opportunity to X will cost me or others in light of my or their desire to Y. If that someone wants to show me that I ought to support her endeavour to X even at a cost to me or others, then she is well advised to find reasons that appeal to me. I think that that's just built into how things are, at least in a reasonably fair democratic system for making public decisions. I don't see how it's unfair of me to try to discover why I should support her endeavour to X or to act only on reasons that seem to me to be good reasons; I don't see how I am thwarting pluralism by failing to take her good reasons from her point of view to want to X to be good reasons for me to support her endeavour to X. (Again, that she wants to X is already a reason for me to support her, independently of whether she has good reasons from her own view to want to X. One way in which I respect her is not to require that she explain herself to me. She can if she wants, but if it is none of my business, fair enough.)

Blood is lots of things and means even more. I don't see the significance of the fact that not all of the meanings of blood can be turned out in secular terms. I'd say that none of the meanings of blood can be turned out in secular terms. Secularity is not a hermeneutic; it doesn't trade in meanings. Now I who think there are no sacraments and who finds the notion of a sacrament silly can still understand the meaning that spilling of blood has to the Catholic Workers. I can appreciate their gesture-I can see its power. None of this should matter to a court, of course. The question is just what is the appropriate punishment for this act of vandalism given statute and precedent. (That the vandalism occurred in the context of a protest against government action might be relevant, again depending on statute and precedent.) There are further questions, of course: are the laws governing this sort of thing good laws? Were they democratically enacted? But that the act drew on meanings from within the Catholic tradition is irrelevant. If Catholics who vandalize something as a protest by spilling blood are not guilty of a crime, then neither are non-Catholics who vandalize something as a protest by spilling blood; if non-Catholics are to be punished for vandalizing something as a protest by spilling blood, then so, too, are Catholics. I can't believe Kathleen would say that Catholicism is a get-out-jail-free card; but I can't see what else she could be saying.

That Betty would not like me to take a photograph of her is a reason for me not to take a photograph of her, whatever her reason is why she wouldn't like me to take a photograph of her. If I respect Betty, it won't matter to me whether her reason is good, bad, indifferent, or nutty. To require Betty to give me a good reason not to take her picture-or else I take her picture-is for me to fail to respect Betty. Now I might have by my lights an excellent reason to take a photograph of Betty. If getting the photograph matters more to me than respecting Betty on this occasion, I will take the photograph despite the fact that she would rather I didn't. That Betty would be pained were she to think I took her picture is also a reason for me not to take her picture. Again, this reason is independent of whether Betty should be pained were I to take her picture. And, again, my getting the picture might matter more to me than that Betty will be pained in the way or to the extent that she will. What the rules and customs are to be, both formally and at the level of ethos, is to be determined democratically. If we are good people, we will support those rules and customs that take into account both those who like to take photos and those who don't want their photo taken, whether we ourselves are among the photo-taking people or the photo-adverse people.

Kathleen asks that beliefs and meanings and actions be accorded respect. Beliefs, meanings, and actions are not things that could be accorded respect. Only people can be respected (or not). We treat a person disrespectfully whenever we manipulate, humiliate, or unfairly burden her. We cannot treat a belief respectfully or disrespectfully. We can, of course, treat a person disrespectfully by mocking her belief-if, that is, in mocking it we humiliate her. (Of course, if she is easily humiliated, then she is treating us disrespectfully by burdening us with her requirement that we be more than ordinarily careful about her feelings. We have an obligation of respect towards others not to be thin skinned, and any social institution that rewards thin-skinnedness encourages disrespect towards people.)

I think a culture in which we have the basic habits of something like modesty, decorum, and formality would be an attractive culture. But such a culture would be attractive only if it is one in which we are free to mock. It would be a culture in which we just don't mock-out of decorum, say, or out of a concern for people's feelings. We ought not to legislate good manners, not even informally. Along with creating people who are modest and have a sense of decorum, though, we should be concerned to create people secure enough in themselves not to be upset by criticism or even by mockery. They would accept those criticisms that are accurate or fair and reject the others. Mockery would have no effect on them.

Kathleen says that for a person of faith (or for some persons of faith), their religious bearing is in the nature of things, like gravity. (I don't think gravity is in the nature of things. That aside, that objects attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance isn't a rule that objects obey, as we obey-or don't- stop signs.) That might be right. But I don't understand what this point implies about reason-giving and reason-evaluation in social or political discussions in a pluralistic society. I've already mentioned that, though. Another difficulty I have is understanding why anyone would want to live as though their own beliefs were poor shadows of the demands of religious authority or community. How awful! To subordinate one's own good sense and even one's happiness to authority or community-how could one want to do that? Sadly, many people do want to do just that. I think Kathleen has put my own opposition to religion better than I could put it myself.

All the best,

Mark Mercer
Department of Philosophy
Saint Mary's University

On February 17, 2008, Dr. Kathleen Skerrett,
Professor of Religious Studies, Grinnell College, Iowa, responds:

Dear Mark,

I apologize that it has taken so long for me to respond, but hope you will be able to have a look at these reflections when you have time.

If the definition of secularism is the one you have proposed: No religious qualifications for government positions and no religious authority be given priority in government policy, then there is no disagreement between us. Our constitutional democracy presumes all positions in legislature and the judiciary are open to all citizens without respect to religious qualification. This is not only acceptable, it is desirable in my view, and, of course, it is congruent with robust pluralism. So if that were the crux of the thing, then there is no argument between us. And we each stipulated this in our remarks.

I am more concerned with an ethos of secularism that provides for a "marketplace" version of pluralism, which is not robust. And I would urge an ethos that is more generous-in order to sustain a more tragic vision of the failure of democratic law and of liberal democracies than you do.

Throughout your remarks you make an assumption that seems to me to be the signature of a secular liberal-the belief that all actions can be appraised and adjudicated as expressions of competing actors' wants. Thus, I might want to pour blood in the recruiter's office; you might want to stop me. I might want to not have my photo taken; you might want to take it. The only way to adjudicate between these wants, where we cannot avoid the conflict, is to put it to the democratic process, have a vote, and on that basis pass a law. In your account, this process is fair, and no one should complain that any wrong has been done when I arrest you for pouring blood or refusing to give photograph in contravention of the law. In your account as well, people who say their position is demanded by something more than "how they would like to live" argue either in confusion or in bad faith because their claims contradict their own best standards of evidence. I would take all of this to be a secular position.

When David says that you have a "faith", I suspect this is what he means. You believe in a world where people act on the basis of wants; in the best cases, their wants are nourished by reasonably verifiable beliefs. Therefore, it is possible for you to hope that religion will disappear, because then people would have wants that were more consistent with publicly verifiable beliefs, and not only would we all be better adjusted to empirical reality, we would have fewer conflicts that could not be adjudicated to mutually satisfactory ends.

But this, of course, is a reality that seems not only implausible to me; if true, it would be a world bereft of meanings and opportunities and beauties that I experience as real, and real with a kind of vibrancy and urgency that goes beyond what I want. My "wanting" is related to all of that in ways that are often mysterious to me-that I think of as sinful. The practice of my faith is a way to sort some of that out. Which is why you say-perfectly consistently-that I make a better argument against being religious than you do.

When I said that people who are religious do not act on the basis of "belief", I meant this: their faith shows them the world; it is allows them to see reality as they move in it-not a model of belief about it or a projection of fantasy that creates it. So: by analogy, imperfectly: I do not obelieveo in a law of gravity; but I act constantly in ways that evince its reality to me. Neither an explanation nor a proof of the law of gravity is lacking from my way of moving with it. Although the explanation and the proof are quite interesting, they do not add to my way of moving.

Or, let me give a different sort of example. To say that, "I know that my Redeemer saves me" is more like saying "I know that my daughter loves me" than it is like saying "I know that my insurer covers me." The syntax looks the same, but each of the three statements carries an intensity of meaning-and plausible practices of verification that are incommensurable. You can say to me, prove that your insurer will cover you, and I can say, well, here are the documents, and if he tries to wiggle out of it, I'll sue. But if you say, prove that your daughter loves you, what can I do? I might say here are her testimonials and gestures. But I cannot prove it to you, nor, and this is crucial, can I demand my daughter prove it to me. In a similar way, I cannot prove to you that my Redeemer saves me-because none of the words in the sentence can be translated into the syntax that could be tested by your best standards of evidence. But to live in a world where that latter sentence is judged as nonsense, the second judge as sentimental hope or possibly maternal demand, and only my insurer has the necessary heft to stand or fall-I cannot imagine this as real life.

Robust pluralism means to me that we all cultivate ethical attention to the ways that other people's faith causes them to act according to realities that transcend "what they want". They act out of a sense of necessity or obligation or truth that is not simply a disguise for desire or a rationale for a policy that might have been better taken on the basis of sound evidence. In this regard, for some religious people, the "calculus of decency" you suggest between what the other needs and what self-denial is required in the case is just not the sort of calculus that can be put to a vote. (This would also be true in the ethics of some very decent atheists.)

Elizabeth Castelli's work on the trials of Catholic Workers and the protest in New York appeals to me because what I see in that transcript is the tragic exposure of the Catholic Workers appeal to truth before secular law. When the recruiting officer testifies, after he grasps the blood-wet door-"I realized I had blood on my hands"-there is a moment of instability. What does he mean? He is telling the truth. But he does not know it. The Catholic Workers are there because the Iraqi War is an evil that must be stopped-and that to participate in it as citizens is to have blood on our hands. For the Catholic Workers the choice of blood is crucially related to their long sacramental practice of the Eucharist-of their participation in the reality that Christ's blood is shed for the sin of the world.

When Elizabeth Castelli first gave the paper-she marked the recruiter's comment as the point where the protest failed. But I tried to persuade her that it was the moment of truth in the transcript, of the tragic exposure of truth to democratic law. "I realized I had blood on my hands.": He means that he needs to wash his hands for hygienic reasons. But he says the words that the Catholic Workers believe are true! In a robust democracy citizens would have sufficient ethical humility and discretion to experience this testimony with a sense of tragedy. That is what I mean by robust pluralism.

But there is another possibility-a world in which citizens see only that blood is a biohazard, the law is the law, and the Catholic Workers are vandals, even if nice ones. The second time I saw Castelli give the paper, members of the audience predominantly identified with the recruiting officer-they saw him as a guy who is trying to get through the day with the least complications and then this mess shows up. There was no tragic revelation, just what we might call the audience's identification with a bloody inconvenience that makes the day longer before a person can get home to cable and beer.

I do not know how the tragic exposure of the Catholic Workers to the force of democratic law could be mitigated. But I do note they were prosecuted twice in different jurisdictions because the Bush administration did not like the outcome of their first trial and was not going to let that sort of "vandalism" go unpunished. That's a lot of legal attention to give to vandals. They were sent to jail, as they knew they must be. But to live in a world where what they did might no longer be seen as a tragic exposure to democratic law-even if not everyone can see it-that to me would be a loss on the way to the sort of technological ontology that has given us bureaucratic genocide.

Historically, it is not true that liberal democracies have been less xenophobic or more egalitarian or more hospitable to aliens or less bellicose or less vicious in war. So that to imagine that liberal values somehow protect us from the evils you project onto illiberal societies is dangerous. Faithful people stand against the premise that pluralism can only be a modus vivendi of powerful constituencies that modify each other's wants and aspirations by democratic means. We stand against it because, as you say, it is possible to accept that view and to actively wish that certain ways of seeing reality would disappear in the competition among ideas - because that would not be wrong-even if they were true.

Yours truly,

Kathleen Skerrett

On 2/19/08 12:19 PM, David Deane wrote:

Hi There,

Many thanks for these points Mark and Kathleen. I enjoyed reading them very much. I must admit my presentation had a far less modest account of secularity than Mark proposes. I was arguing largely against the vision of secular life that we encounter in Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" which is predicated upon a certain understanding of reason. With the collapse of this understanding of reason (and here I followed Nietzsche in particular as well as some more recent echoers of Nietzsche) the secular, as it was understood in its 18th century Golden Age, is, for me, no longer tenable. I can't share the way certain dichotomies function at this time (public/private, reason/faith, and epistemology/ontology) as they're alien to the recent continental, and patristic Christian, traditions that have shaped me.

While I'm not all that alien to Mark's account of secularity I do this that it's still predicated upon epistemological and ontological notions that I don't share. I think one of the reasons I struggle to find Mark's arguments convincing (as he mine) is the two different conceptual frameworks from which we're drawing.

For me we adopt different "Memes" based on a radical plurality of factors shaped by desire, mimesis, and context the semantic content of "power" and "beauty" within our experiential lexicon. Everybody is the same in this. Mark has ideas about "Reason" and "Evidence" and of course religious people do too, largely though I feel there are causes for our beliefs before there are reasons for them. This is because what is rational is tradition specific. We are seduced by a tradition (and usually many traditions) and then x becomes rational based on it connoting that which is rational in terms of that tradition. Such reasons function within language games, for example, Mark below defines "decency" as x and after having defined it as x proceeds to make arguments about what does and does not come under the remit of "decency". So too pragmatic arguments depend upon identifying what would "work" but "work" involves a plurality of values that we see as "good". And so the whole process of argumentation is tradition specific, in Mark's case a tradition of liberalism which, for me, unlike Christianity and Islam, hasn't yet realized that it is a "din" or a "faith", a mode of being in the world where our thoughts are shaped by practices and that which is reasonable is predicated upon the being-in-the-world which we manifest. This is the danger of secularism for me; it's young and hasn't learned its limits yet. I know I'm working within the grammar of a tradition that is porous and so many traditions are represented there. I don't think I could say to Mark "Look this Christian thing is rational, can't you see?" as it's no more rational to Mark than the language games of analytic philosophy are to me. And so while I enjoy and learn from Mark's email I find the evangelical zeal of a Dawkins or a Dennett (I both use in their non theological writing in Nietzsche and theology and admire both greatly) to be born of an utterly mistaken epistemology that Mark, although in a far more sophisticated form that Dawkins and Dennett, hints at.

I realized, reading Mark's text that I was terribly unclear about how the signifier "faith" functioned for me. Faith for me is a "din" a mode of being which shapes our reasoning in concrete interrelationship with practice. Maybe a clearer understanding of what I mean by faith may come out in contrast to what I fear Mark might mean by "Reason". Mark says, and this for me was strange "The main problem with religious beliefs is that all arguments for their truth fail by the believer's own standards" here I can only assume that secularism, as religions in the past have done and created misery and oppression through it, establishes a "normative" person who has standards such that "let reason = x" where reason is as it would be for Mark. But of course whether Religious people's standards are the same as those of that brave and bold minority, the "brights" or not, the problem with Mark's statement is that is seems to focus on a brief window in theological history where some Christians made precisely the same mistake that the secular (which was founded on these mistakes) made later. That is they assumed that there was a universal epistemological thing called "Reason" and by reason they could prove or make arguments for their faith in a way accessible to all (a notion they bequeathed to the modernity they give birth to). But of course the language of universally binding arguments and even "beliefs" is a language of modernity. As such Mark is engaging the issue (as that bizarre thing "philosophy of Religion" tends to) in a way which people who aware of themselves a people of faith cannot engage as it tries to tell them what their faith life consists in ways that people of faith find bizarre and ridiculous.

The person of faith, rather, has a mode of being shaped by ideas, worship, actions that are constitutive of a relationship or relationships (in their case with God) that orients them. They often abstract propositions from this but the propositions are later than the relationship (although the propositions can in turn fuel the relationship, what Augustine called the circulus veritatis dei). Knowledge of God is a relation of knower and known before it is propositional. "Faith" is a mode of being, a set of practices and relationships which shapes what connotes reason for us and which facilitates the production of propositional beliefs based upon these relationships. It is never, that bizarre thing that late medieval ontolotheologians dreamed up and which modernity developed from, something "objective". My point, possibly "trivial" as Mark says (but having read Dawkins and Dennett I think it may still need to be made) is simply that there is no objective space, that our rationality is context and tradition specific and that the propositions which we come to call "beliefs" are born of relationships within concrete ontological contexts.

Christians, Muslims and most people of faith I know, in stark contrast to that strange thing religion as religion tends to function in philosophy of religion don't hear a set of propositions, the "beliefs" that wikipedia tells us constitute "Christianity" or "Islam" or "Wicca" and say 'that's the one for me - where do I sign". An example of the relationship between faith and propositional belief (and an especially trite one at that!) is - well, let's say I have acne. I find a cream that says "put me on your spots and they'll clear up". I put it on and they do. Now it could be a coincidence, and while I'll know it might be I'll also assume that the spot cream is what it says it is based on the "result" I've had. I'll also infer properties about the cream, although again, here I'll accept I could be mistaken. Now Christians in the early Church encounter Christ in a similar fashion, they think of themselves as violent, the encounter this "din", this mode of being that says, "this will take you from being a violent self and shape you toward peacefulness", and they try it. When they start to experience themselves as being different they infer things about what they hold to be the transformatory agent. As they see this agent as a person they make inferences such that the person is x and wills y. x is doctrine and y is ethics. They're always aware (until the high Middle Ages or early modern period at least) that they could be mistaken. Nothing can be certain for them but "certainty" is never a big issue until "Facts" come about. As Alistair McIntyre memorably wrote, "Fact's, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a 17th century invention". Sotierology is THE driving force of early Christology. Given what Christ has done for us who can we say he is? Is the Christological question that leads to Nicaea and Chalcedon. Robert Wilken has written a great book called "The Spirit of Early Christian Thought" which illustrates how Christians reason (and I've learned enough about the Muslim concept "din" to believe that Muslims too have a very different epistemology to the one we find in modernity, itself based on Luther's error in "Sola Fidei" which images faith as a purely epistemological reality and so doing creates the purely epistemological space necessary for Descartes and Kant). The more "organic" (materialist) epistemologies that we're finding in Mark's analytic tradition as well as in the Neo-Nitzschean continental tradition (Deleuze especially) ruptures much of the epistemology we find in secular modernity, in my opinion. So the secular needs to realize that people reason differently, the public realm is a space where people attempt to seduce and/or pollinate other traditions of thought and any secular idea that distinguishes between a "faith based" or a "reason" based approach is just wrong. Both are rational within the terms of their own traditions and within these traditions our signifiers function based on a discreet lexicon. My point is that this is how people come to beliefs, through lived experienced within traditions of discourse and enquiry; there is no "pure" rational space. People come to beliefs this way, not religious or secular people but everyone whether they know it or not. Faith to me is "din" a mode of being that shapes our reasoning which is never "pure" and everyone has a din (and as such is a person of faith) the whole faith is believing in mad stuff, reason is believing in provable stuff is strange to me as for many people what they believe is more provable in terms of their own rationality than gravity.

So I warmly welcome a robust pluralism that nourishes such a plurality of "din". This does not have to be agonistic at all. Muslim Spain gives many examples of where in a pre-modern time discourses could pollinate each other. I am a Christian. My Christianity is laced through with the genetic code of modernity, post modernity and in recent years, has been pollinated by dialog with Islamic scholars. I have no doubt I understand God differently through these dialogs but I can't say for sure. The signifiers through which I understand my "faith" mean other things after dialog with "others". I have not been convinced through argument, I have been pollinated, seduced, contaminated by ideas which alter the signifiers I read in scripture and tradition. I love the idea of analytic philosophy, a world where people trade epistemological machines, arguments, and after testing them we decide which to take into our brains or not. But for me this is the flying spaghetti monster world, it's a fantasy. Rather the process is far more organic, sublimated, and the society that can best nourish the cross pollination of traditions is a pluralist one where no tradition (the secular included) is privileged. Not privileging the secular is difficult, as indeed not privileging Christianity. But our societies (and here I'm showing the liberal modernity that has shaped me) should strive for a genuine pluralism which can allow for agonistic completion between traditions of discourse and the cross pollination of these discourses. When Mark thinks though that this debate is conducted based on terms that analytic philosophy would support he's wrong, this tradition with it's understanding of argument, is simply one tradition and one that does not reflect the way humans imbibe ideas and have their signifiers impregnated with semantic content.

But while part of the problem is the radically different anthropologies, another part of the problem is that when imagining what a "good" society would be like we're not so different! We're both pluralists who feel that religious traditions should not get "special treatment" or that public office should mandate religious faith. If this is what a secularist is, I'm a secularist. But I also feel that public office should not prohibit people of faith or communities of faith from having their own roles and rules, within boundaries shaped by the necessities for pluralism and the "freedom" of the individual from coercion. As such I completely support Rowan Williams statements about utilizing Islamic Law last week and while I don't in any way support my own Roman catholic Church's position on homosexuality I support the rights of a roman Catholic adoption (or any other adoption agency) to act in a manner harmonious with its own norms.

I am sorry to have taken so long to reply too. I was in Ireland when I got Mark's first email and it just got buried until Kathleen's email last night coming very timely during reading week here at AST! So many thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I have no doubt that even though I can't understand or accept many of your positions, dialoging with them shapes, changes and pollinates me.

Many thanks for this.

Warmest Regards,
David

On Tuesday, February 19, 2008 4:24 PM, Kathleen Skerrett responds:

Dear David,

Thank you very much for this, and hope that I did not "put words in your mouth" - having no idea at all what you had said. I love the idea of "din" - and would venture that we need robust pluralism for precisely the reason that "religion" does not exist except among "scholars of" - most especially "scholars of" who dislike their putative object. I like the idea of din and I like the idea of the public as a space of "cross-pollination" rather than a marketplace of ideas. All of the great so-called world religions have their origins in what a wonderful AST student once described to me as "braided streams" - a geological term.

For me, though, I don't really want to do rounds of faith/reason anymore-I am much more interested in how to cultivate shared ethos of citizenry that allows us to see some things together or at least allows some of us to see some things together-and one of those things would be the tragic exposure of truth to coercive state force. I am interested in how Mark's position would allow us to do that. And hope also that Jamal Badawi will respond too-though realize all of us are under heavy constraints of time.

Kathleen Skerrett

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