A "Sleep of Reason," or Simply Natural?

Another interesting link from Arts & Letters Daily which appeals to my mystic side, or faith.  The piece was written by Pascal Boyer and is titled “Why is Religion Natural?" An interesting excerpt for your consideration.

"Religion as the “Sleep of Reason”

There is a long and respectable tradition of explaining religion as the consequence of a flaw in mental functioning. Because people do not think much or not very well, the argument goes, they let all sorts of unwarranted beliefs clutter their mental furniture. In other words, there is religion around because people fail to take prophylactic measures against beliefs, for one of the following reasons:

People are superstitious, they will believe anything. People are naturally prepared to believe all sorts of accounts of strange or counter-intuitive phenomena. Witness their enthusiasm for UFOs as opposed to scientific cosmology, for alchemy instead of chemistry, for urban legends instead of hard news. Religious concepts are both cheap and sensational; they are easy to understand and rather exciting to entertain.

Religious concepts are irrefutable. Most incorrect or incoherent claims are easily refuted by experience or logic but religious concepts are different. They invariably describe processes and agents whose existence could never be verified and are consequently never refuted. As there is no evidence against most religious claims, people have no obvious reason to stop believing them.

Refutation is more difficult than belief. It takes greater effort to challenge and rethink established notions than just accept them. Besides, in most domains of culture we just absorb other people’s notions. Religion is no exception. If everyone round about you says that there are invisible dead people around, and everyone acts accordingly, it would take a much greater effort to try and verify such claims than it takes to accept them, if only provisionally.

I find all these arguments unsatisfactory. Not that they are false: religious claims are indeed beyond verification. People do like sensational supernatural tales better than banal stories and they generally spend little time rethinking every bit of cultural information they acquire. But this cannot be a sufficient explanation for why people have the concepts they have, the beliefs they have, the emotions they have. The idea that we are often gullible or superstitious is certainly true; but we are not gullible in just every possible way. People do not generally strive to believe six impossible things before breakfast, as does the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Religious claims are irrefutable, but so are all sorts of other far-fetched notions that we never find in religion. Take for instance the claim that my right hand is made of green cheese except when people examine it, that God ceases to exist every Wednesday afternoon, that cars feel thirsty when their tanks run low, or that cats think in German. I could make up hundreds of such interesting and irrefutable beliefs that no one would ever consider as a possible belief."

Posted by on 06/26 at 05:15 PM

  1. John, if I erect a cult (involving, say, the animist fallacy as applied to thirsty cars) as a vehicle for fleecing masses of gullible fools while exhorting them to force-initiatory social action—you may properly label it as a religion at your convenience.

    Posted by  on  06/26  at  08:52 PM

  2. Mike - I’ve considered just your proposition, though not centered around thirsty gas tanks, in discussions with a friend.  The interesting thing, is, it would not be difficult to erect a cult, garner members, and fleece them while at the same time exhorting them to acts of mercy and contrition while I got to sit on a golden throne mouthing platitudes, prior to taking collection.

    Posted by  on  06/27  at  07:17 AM

  3. So there arn’t invisible dead people around?

    That’s a relief!

    Posted by J. "Skeered O' Ghosts" Sabotta  on  06/28  at  09:28 PM

  4. So, there’s nothing that is unknowable by what would be considered conventional means?

    Posted by bithead  on  06/29  at  08:46 AM

  5. Sure there are, Bithead. The composition of a black-hole, for instance.

    But if I told you in no uncertain terms that a big space alien living inside the event-horizon was promising 47 vice-tight virgins to whomever first nuked the White House, it’d be might *rational* of you to scratch your head for awhile before smuggling in the uranium.

    Posted by  on  06/29  at  11:27 PM

  6. I would submit that the discussion would be far more productive (And far less damagingly general) were it to occurr on another level.

    While I agree that following such teachings is irrational, I think you and I make such judgements on different levels. I submit the irrationality really enters the discussion when one avers that such teachings are part and parcel of any religion calling itself a “religion of peace”.

    Posted by Bithead  on  06/30  at  06:53 AM

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