Taylor om Dawkins syn på tro och vetenskap

Charles Taylor skriver träffande i en fotnot till A Secular Age:

Dawkins’ reasons for believing that science can sideline religion hardly inspire confidence. They draw heavily on an oversimple distinction between “faith” and “science”. “A case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.” As for science, it “is free of the main vice of religion, which is faith.” But to hold that there are no assumptions in a scientist’s work which aren’t already based on evidence is surely a reflection of a blind faith, one that can’t even feel the occasional tremor of doubt. Few religious believers are this untroubled. 

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Belknap, 2007. s. 835 not 27

The myth of the Secular

Ideas är ett utmärkt radioprogram på CBC - den kanadensiska motsvarigheten till BBC. Jag upptäckte just att de i slutet av oktober kommer att sända sju program på temat The Myth of the Secular. Att döma av gäster och upplägg ser det fantastiskt intressant ut:

Monday, October 22
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 1
Western social theory once insisted that modernization meant secularization and secularization meant the withering away of religion. But religion hasn't withered away, and this has forced a rethinking of the whole idea of the secular. IDEAS producer David Cayley talks to Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics, and Rajeev Barghava of India's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. 

Tuesday, October 23
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 2
The secular is often defined as the absence of religion, but secular society is in many ways a product of religion. In conversation with IDEAS producer David Cayley British sociologist David Martin explores the many ways in which modern secular society continues to draw on the repertoire of themes and images found in the Bible. 

Wednesday, October 24
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 3
Early in the post-colonial era, politics in most Muslim countries were framed in secular and nationalist terms. During the last thirty years, the Islamic revival has dramatically changed this picture. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood talks with IDEAS producer David Cayley about her book, The Politics of Piety. 

Thursday, October 25
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 4
The Fundamentals was a series of books, published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, which tried to set the basics of Christianity in stone. Fundamentalism now refers to any back-to-basics movement. Malise Ruthven's Fundamentalism asks what all these movements have in common, in this feature interview with David Cayley. 

Friday, October26
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 5
"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." So wrote German legal theorist Carl Schmitt in a book called Political Theology. American legal theorist Paul Kahn has just published Political Theology: Four New Chapters in which he argues that the foundations of the American state remain theological. He explores this theme with IDEAS producer David Cayley.

Monday, October, 29
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 6
In 1990 British theologian John Milbank published a five-hundred-page manifesto called Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. The book argued that theology should stop deferring to social theories that are just second-hand theology and declare itself, once again, the queen of the sciences. The book led, in time, to a movement called "Radical Orthodoxy." IDEAS producer David Cayley profiles John Milbank. 

Tuesday, October 30
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 7
IDEAS producer David Cayley concludes his series with three thinkers who believe that division of the world into the secular and the religious both oversimplifies and impoverishes political and religious life. Political philosopher William Connolly argues for a richer and more inclusive public sphere; historian of religion Mark Taylor calls for a new philosophy of religion; and Fred Dallmayr presents the case for a deeper and more thorough-going pluralism.

Tune in!

Rosenberg och Jackelén om den politiska religionen

 

Konferenstips ...

Telos har just presenterat temat för nästa års konferens, Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular World:

The 21st century has been marked by both events and reflections that have explicitly challenged the long-standing liberal project of maintaining a separation between religion and politics. Not only have political conflicts become inseparable from theological and metaphysical considerations, but standard liberal claims of value-neutrality have been undermined by insights into the theological presuppositions of secular institutions. The goal of the 2013 Telos Conference will be to investigate the changing relationship between religion and politics. Possible topics include secularization and the "post-secular" turn; the theological foundations of political systems such as liberalism, socialism, and fascism; political theology; religion and the public sphere; separation of church and state; new civil forms of religious practice; the politics of religious pluralism; myth and sovereignty; theology and modernity; religion and political values; theocracy and religious law.

Ses vi New York i februari?

Om religion som möjlighet snarare än hot

Today’s political culture is characterized by a growing opposition between political secularism and religious fundamentalism. I take it this is a fruitless opposition that  can be overcome by a more thoroughgoing awareness of what it means to be secular. We can no longer act as if religion is an unequivocal explanation of the crisis of modern democracy. It might as well be the the lack of religion that threatens modern democracies by making democracy a purely formal system, without inherent value and purpose.
[...]
The secularist rhetoric that fears the presence of religion in society, is also misleading because we can not simply repeat the arguments from the nineteenth century in which both the state and the Church had a firm seat. Today’s challenge is not primarily to save the state from religion, but even more of saving the state as such. The crisis of democracy is the crisis of weak states and powerless governments. The state is not threatened more by religion, than by market parties, a failing public system and media
manipulation.

HJ Prosman. The Postmodern Condition and the Meaning of Secularity. (Ars Disputandi, 2011), 240

DN och illusionen om det opolitiska

Jag läser att DN inför en policy om att ordet "hen" inte får användas i nyhets- eller reportagetexter. DN lär motivera beslutet med att "hen" kan uppfattas som ett "queerpolitiskt ställningstagande".

Man kan naturligtvis ha olika åsikter om både hen som begrepp och om queer-teori, men att motivera ett begreppsförbud med att ordet i sig skulle vara politiskt säger något om DN:s självuppfattning och världsbild. Tydligen skall "oberoende liberal" inte uppfattas som en politisk positionering utan kanske snarare som en epistemologisk etikett som anger att man skriver från en ideologiskt neutral position varifrån man kan bedöma världen. Att DN:s påbud skulle kunna riskera att uppfattas som ett "hetropolitiskt ställningstagande" verkar inte förespegla dem.

Företällningen om att det skulle finnas ett opolitiskt språk är ett maktspel som bara gynnar dem som säger sig prata det universella språket.

Hauerwas on private faith

Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy

Konferenstips!

"Since most people assume, against naturalism, the reality of things like free will, intentionality and love, it might well be that religion, rather than scientism, will soon be generally perceived as more aligned with common sense. For if mind and soul are not readily derivable from below, must they not rather be derivable from above?"

Ses vi i Oxford nästa år?

Om den falska motsättningen mellan tro och rationalitet

One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. (...) 

But more important in some ways, it seems to me, is to stress how great an element of faith is present in the operations of even the most disinterested rationality. All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit. A Christian and a confirmed materialist may both believe that there really is a rationally ordered world out there that is susceptible of empirical analysis; but why they should believe this to be the case is determined by their distinctive visions of the world, by their personal experiences of reality, and by patterns of intellectual allegiance that are, properly speaking, primordial to their thinking, and that lead toward radically different ultimate conclusions (though the more proximate conclusions reached through their research may be identical). 

What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments (some of which—“blood and soil,” the “master race,” the “socialist Utopia”—produce prodigies of evil precisely to the degree that they are “rationally” pursued). We may, obviously, as modern men and women, find certain of the fundamental convictions that our ancestors harbored curious and irrational; but this is not because we are somehow more advanced in our thinking than they were, even if we are aware of a greater number of scientific facts. We have simply adopted different conventions of thought and absorbed different prejudices, and so we interpret our experiences according to another set of basic beliefs—beliefs that may, for all we know, blind us to entire dimensions of reality.

David Bentley Hart. Atheist Delusions, Yale University Press, 2009. s. 101-102

Regnig midsommar?

Vad skall man kolla på när sista avsnitten av Mad Men och Game of Thrones sänts? Här kommer några förslag:

- Föreläsningar av bland andra Graham Ward, Sarah Coakley, Miroslav Volf, Mark Noll, Werner Jeanrond, mfl.  från konferensen Flourishing of Universities.

- Intervjuer med den lilla skara som både hållit The Gifford Lectures och belönats med The Tempelton Prize, som till exempel Charles Taylor.

- Några kortare föreläsningar av Mark Noll, Rachel Fulton Brown, och Brad Gregory som diskuterar Gregorys bok, The Unintended Reformation.

The end of "religious diversity" as a problem

"Most of us take for granted some variation of the following: religion involves heart-felt convictions and deep commitments, and therefore invokes impassioned disagreement, "exclusivist" and "intolerant" behaviour, and even violence. It is thus in dire need - given today's social "problem" of "religious diversity" - of being (take your pick):

• eradicated by means of education;

• ignored until it withers away on its own; or

• "updated" in order to become a good ally to the "progress" of the modern world.

The questions posed by philosophers of religion suggest that they believe that religion needs philosophy's help in order to come to rational, peaceful resolutions to social conflicts inflamed or caused by religion. 

I would suggest that it is imperative for us to see that the questions posed in this way (and therefore the answers that they imply) are a relic of a past. Recall for a moment that the central task to which the Enlightenment "project" self-consciously set itself - glorious and youthful, if also utterly naive - was to discern and possess the rational conditions by which the truth of things could be accessed, and thereby to dictate to every field of human inquiry the rational scope of its enterprise, the conditions by which it could properly proceed to secure knowledge of its particular object."
[...]
" Philosophy could hardly hope to make a contribution to the problem of religious diversity unless it were to gain from religious faith the paths of reasoning that overcome the "end of metaphysics" and transcend the utterly un-compelling flattening out of reason reduced to some artificial thought-out-in-advance conditions for what is possibly true."

The problem of religious diversity and the dead-end of reason - Chris Hackett

Stuff you could get away with `85 ...

"Says Tina who chants regularly at her own Buddhist altar 'in this faith you decide what's right and wrong'." - LIFE Magazine, Aug 85'

Cunningham om liv och död inom biologin

"Indeed, as one Nobel prize winning biologist argues: ‘Biologists no longer study life today [because] biology has demonstrated that there is no metaphysical entity behind the word life.’ Everything remains unseen and, in this sense, unsaid; for what difference is there, biologically speaking, between an organism that is biologically now in one way and now in another? The system of explanatory description will offer only nominal or diacritical difference because its immanent identity relies on this inability. As Doyle argues, such discourse is predicated on the ability to say ‘that is all there is’."

Conor Cunningham. Genealogy of Nihilism. (Routledge, 2002), s.176

Ben Myers on Psalms for all seasons

If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings (God-you-make-me-happy, and God-I’m-infatuated-with-you) – considerably less even than the emotional range of a normal adult person. It is why entire congregations sometimes seem strangely adolescent, or even infantile: they lack a proper emotional range, as well as a suitable adult vocabulary. But in the psalter one finds the entire range of human emotion and experience – a range that is vastly wider than the emotional capacity of any single human life.

Ben Myers on Psalms for all seasons

Graham Ward om ondska

Let’s talk about evil in a Christian context. After all, it’s part of the Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver us from evil.” Most liturgies begin with an act of contrition, an act of confession. There is a sense in which confession actually aligns us with the will of God, which is the will of the good. And in that sense, confession turns us away from all those things that have a tendency toward what is evil. 

From a classical theological context—and here I’m going back to Aquinas and Augustine—there is no substantive thing called evil. Evil doesn’t have any ontological weight at all. God gives existence to all things and all things in the existence that God has given are good. And so evil is not any thing at all. But when we turn away from that which sustains us and maintains us in our being, we are moving toward that which is the negation of what we were created for. And so what we see as turning toward evil is a turning toward nonexistence, toward that which is denigrating to our creaturely status as creations of God, who is Good. Within that context, then, prayer is a confession of reorientation toward that which is good. It is a confession that we have been involved in acts that are counter to the honoring and worship of God and a recognition that we are created beings who are dependent on God. 

And so prayer is a reorientation toward the Good. And that’s what we mean in the Christian tradition when we speak of sanctification. Our reorientation toward God brings about a change, a transformation, a metanoia, that in fact turns us away from the disobedient misuse of those goods God has given us. It’s not that there is a substance called “evil.” When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil,” we’re not asking God to deliver us from some substantial, evil thing that is out there, because that would make us dualists rather than monotheists, that would suggest a divine good fighting a divine bad. There’s no good fighting the bad in the Christian tradition because the bad just doesn’t exist in that way. There is only God’s goodness, and God’s goodness will win out in the end.

Graham Ward intervjuad i The Other Journal

Taylor om likheten mellan fundamentalisters och materialisters världsbild

The mechanical outlook which splits nature from supernature voids all this mystery. This split generates the modern concept of the “miracle”; a kind of punctual hole blown in the regular order of things from outside, that is, from the transcendent. Whatever is higher must thus come about through the holes pierced in the regular, natural order, within whose normal operation there is no mystery. This is curiously enough, a view of things shared between materialists and Christian Fundamentalists. Only for these, it provides proof of “miracles”, because certain things are unexplained by the normal course of natural causation. For the materialist, it is a proof that anything transcendent is excluded by “science”.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, s. 547

Tertullianus om nationaldagsfirande

This is the reason, then, why Christians are counted public enemies: that they pay no vain, nor false, nor foolish honours to the emperor; that, as men believing in the true religion, they prefer to celebrate their festal days with a good conscience, instead of with the common wantonness.

Tertullianus, Apology kap. XXXV

Om moral i allmänhet

The Atlantic publicerade nyligen en gallup-undersökning angående amerikaners ståndpunkter i vissa "moralfrågor". Artikeln fick rubriken Americans' Attitudes About Sin. Detta trots att frågorna, så vitt jag förstår, inte gavs någon religös inramning utan endast handlade om huruvida olika handlingar var moraliskt acceptabla eller inte. Visst kan det kristna kulturarvets prägel fortfarande skönjas i både frågorna och svaren, men tiden då kristendomen präglade människors moraluppfattning genom att tillhandahålla en någorlunda sammanhängande moralsyn är sedan länge förbi. Det är givetvis fortsatt intressant att fundera över svaren såväl som vilka frågor som bedömts som etiskt laddade, men jag fastnade i en annan tanke.

Även om rubriksättningen talar om amerikaners förhållande till synd, så  misstänker jag att det är allt färre som kopplar moraliska ställningstaganden till en kristen förståelse av synd. Vad som intresserar mig är istället hur majoriteten av de som inte bekänner sig till en "religiös" tradition resonerar inför Gallups frågeställning. Hur uppfattas frågan om att något är "moraliskt acceptabelt" respektive "moraliskt fel"? Om en kristen förståelse av moraliskt handlande vanligen utgått från en kristocentrisk läsning av Bibeln samt den kristna traditionens förståelse av vad det innebär att vara människa i i termer av antropologi, teleologi, strävande efter kristuslikhet, etc., uppstår frågan om vilken berättelse som ligger till grund för den sekulariserade människans förståelse av moraliskt handlande. Vilken norm har man för vad som utgör ett moraliskt handlande? Plikten? Förnuftet? Nyttan? Känslan? Sannolikt en kombination, men jag misstänker att den egna känslan väger tungt.

Någon kan säkert uppfatta det som att jag här lite lagom gubbsurt och självrättfärdigt pekar finger åt dem som inte har en bestämd etik att stödja sig på, eller att jag slår in öppna dörrar när jag påpekar att "moral" inte finns i allmänhet. Det är inte min avsikt, och inte heller min poäng. Alla moralsystem, berättelser och traditioner har sina "sprickor", problem och inkonsekvenser.

Det som intresserar mig handlar om möjligheten till meningsfull diskussion i moralfrågor. Problemet med om allt fler utgår från den egna känslan för sina moraliska överväganden är  inte enbart det faktum att vi i stor utsträckning "känner olika", utan att vi i det närmaste helt saknar ett språk för att föra ett rationellt kring frågor om etik och politik. Om gapet mellan gårdagens socialister och liberaler uppfattades som oöverstigligt på grund av vitt skilda antaganden om det goda samhället, så går det ändå inte att jämföra med de klyftor som idag kan skilja enskilda individer åt. I en sådan tid (någon har kallat den "agonistisk hyperpluralism") blir ett konstruktivt politiskt samtal om det goda samhället omöjligt. Detta då det saknas resurser för att kommunicera skiljaktigheter på ett meningsfullt sätt. Vi ser redan hur politik i allt mindre utsträckning handlar om konkret debatt som appellerar till förnuftet, och i allt större utsträckning handlar om att "manipulera massorna" genom reklamkampanjer.
Metafysiskt förankrad etik har under senmoderniteten kritiserats hårt för dess benägenhet att betona identitet på bekostnad av skillnad och därigenom skapa förtryckande hierarkier. Men baksidan av en etik som bara betonar skillnad blir att moral lätt blir en fråga om makt. Om man inte tillstår att det finns rätt och fel bortom vår egen känsla och vårt eget tyckande, då kommer den med makt att definiera vad som är moraliskt acceptabelt. Djungelns lag är också en hierarki.

I avsaknad av traditioner och gemenskaper ("religiösa" eller ej) med någorlunda koherenta föreställningar om vad som är gott och ont, eftersträvansvärt och förkastligt, etc., uppstår frågan om vem eller vad som då styr våra uppfattningar i "moralfrågor"? Själv tippar jag på marknaden. Den individualiserade människan är ett lätt byte för kapitalismens logik.

"The Unintended Reformation" Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame

via @sebasti_an