New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    Wettstein’s practice-based attitude to religious faith: Is realist theism no longer the only game in town?

    In philosophy of religion, realist theism is the dominant outlook: belief in God is similar to belief in other real things (or supposedly real things) like quarks or oxygen. There is a rather triumphalist narrative about the resurgence of realist theism since the demise of logical positivism (see for instance, Plantinga's advice to Christian philosophers) when logical positivism and its verifiability criterion held sway, philosophers were dissuaded from talking about God in realist terms: religious beliefs were not just false, but meaningless. With the demise of logical positivism, however, theists could again defend realist positions, using a variety of sophisticated arguments. 

    Nevertheless, the question is whether theists in philosophers of religion are not conceding too much to atheists by talking about theism mainly in terms of beliefs. To ignore practice is to ignore a large part of the religious experience, and what makes it meaningful to the theist. Such an exclusive focus can indeed be alienating, as it seems to suggest that theists believe a whole bunch of ideas that are wildly implausible, e.g., that a man resurrected from the dead, or was born of a virgin. This picture of religious life as believing in a set of strange propositions is, as Kvanvig memorably put it, a view that most theists will not recognize themselves in:

    I hardly recognize this picture of religious faith and religious life, except in the sense that one can cease to be surprised or shocked by the neighbor who jumps naked on his trampoline after having seen it for years.

    That is not to say that many theists do believe these things, even in a literal sense, but without looking at the larger picture of practices that help to maintain and instil these beliefs, our epistemology of religion remains woefully incomplete. 

    It is therefore refreshing to read philosopher Howard Wettstein's recent interview in The Stone, who, coming from a Jewish background, emphasizes the practice-based aspects of a religious lifestyle. He argues that "existence" is the wrong idea for God, following Maimonides, and instead argues that "the real question is one's relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life." 


    Further on Wettstein says

    The theism-atheism-agnosticism trio presumes that the real question is whether God exists. I’m suggesting that the real question is otherwise and that I don’t see my outlook in terms of that trio.

    It is very interesting that this looking for alternatives is not unique to Wettstein, but was in fact a fairly common response in my recent qualitative survey on the beliefs and attitudes of philosophers of religion. Many of them, including those coming from a Christian tradition, hesitated to call themselves theists, atheists or agnostics. For example, one associate professor in my survey writes that her unbelief does not equate with atheism: 

    I could not call myself an atheist now, primarily because my thinking about the baggage connected to that word leads me to believe that it does not accurately describe my condition. 

    I'm not saying we should throw realist theism overboard. Rather, practice is an important element of religious life whose philosophical significance has not received as much attention as it ought. Practice, I believe, can help us make sense about how people sustain and accept beliefs that seem prima facie very hard to make sense of.  Using insights from the extended mind thesis and other views of scaffolded and embodied cognition, our epistemology of religion should incorporate these practices into a more complete picture of credal and affective attitudes toward God. 

    Like many other critics, Gutting thinks there is a tension in Wettstein's practice of prayer and his outlook of naturalism. I was similarly skeptical when I read Wettstein's paper on awe and the religious life, and later his book. Now, however, I think we need to understand more about the range of attitudes that underpin religious practice and their relationship to religious doxastic attitudes to determine whether there is a tension. Can the practices stand independent from credal attitudes, as Wettstein suggests is the case for some mathematicians, who work with numbers without any ontological commitments to them? Do we need something like hope or another positive non-doxastic attitude at the very least to support religious practices like prayer? 

    Posted in ,

    5 responses to “Wettstein’s practice-based attitude to religious faith: Is realist theism no longer the only game in town?”

    1. Kelly James Clark Avatar
      Kelly James Clark

      Auguste Comte, not normally known for his piety, recommended that his positivist followers pray two hours per day. I suspect he thought that prayer had therapeutic effects independent of whether or not they garnered divine favor. I look at Calvin a little bit like Comte–no human could change God, inform God, or importune God. So prayer, for Calvin, is therapeutic. We pray not so much for God’s sake, Calvin wrote, as for our own. Not so much for God? Not at all.

      Like

      Reply
    2. Jay Odenbaugh Avatar
      Jay Odenbaugh

      Following Braithwaithe and Cupitt, one could be an expressivist about religious discourse. For example, if one practices a religious faith, one expresses pro-attitudes towards the world. E.g. one expresses hope in the uncertain when we one utters claims regarding God. A more sophisticated version would be to adopt a hybrid expressivist account of religious judgments. They are expressive of both beliefs regarding various doctrines that may be truth-apt but also are expressive of the pro-attitudes mentioned above. Thus, even if the religious doctrines were strictly speaking false, they would register Deweyean sentiments I suppose. Whether any of this is plausible is a different issue of course.

      Like

      Reply
    3. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      A contemporary philosopher who has endeavored to give religious practice far more attention than it has received in philosophical and other circles is John Cottingham: see in particular his book, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005), the first chapter of which is titled, “Religion and spirituality: from praxis to belief.”[1] As he states in the Preface,
      “There is, to be sure, a cognitive core to religious belief, a central set of truth-claims to which the religious adherent is committed; but it can be extremely unproductive to try to evaluate these in isolation. There are rich and complex connections that link religious belief with ethical commitment and individual self-awareness, with the attempt to understand the cosmos and the struggle to find meaning in our lives; and only when these connections are revealed, only when we come to have a broader sense of the ‘spiritual dimension’ within which religion lives and moves, can we begin to see fully what is involved in accepting or rejecting a religious view of reality.”
      Perhaps the most compelling reason to address the praxis dimension of spirituality comes from the fact, according to Cottingham, “that it is in the very nature of religious understanding that it characteristically stems from practical involvement rather than from intellectual analysis” (a fact reinforced by—in the standard case—early socialization into a religious community). Cottingham’s argument for according primacy or priority to religious “praxis” begins with a brief discussion of Pierre Hadot’s work on the role of spiritual exercises in the ancient Greek world (discussed of course by Nussbaum as well in her volume on Hellenistic ethics) and thus the “practical dimension of the spiritual” in the sense later found in St. Ignatius Loyola’s sixteenth-century Ejercicios espirituales (perhaps needless to say, there’s a treatment of the relation of ‘spirituality’ to religion that warrants the wider application of the former to encompass such Stoic ‘exercises’)[2]. As Cottingham says, with Ignatius, “we are dealing with a practical manual—a training manual—and the structured timings, the organized programme of readings, contemplation, meditation, prayer, and reflection, interspersed with the daily rhythms of eating and sleeping, are absolutely central, indeed they are the essence of the thing.” As Hadot and Nussbaum would remind us, more than a few Stoic treatises were titled “On Exercises,”
      “and the central notion of askesis found for example in Epictetus, implied not so much ‘asceticism’ in the modern [or pejorative] sense as a practical programme of training, concerned with the ‘art of living’ [hence the revealing subtitle of John M. Cooper’s recent book, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus]. Fundamental to such programmes was learning the technique of prosoche—attention, a continuous vigilance and presence of the mind (a notion, incidentally, that calls to mind certain Buddhist spiritual techniques). Crucial also was the mastery of methods for the ordering of the passions—what has been called the therapy of desire.”
      Among other things, Cottingham has a wonderful discussion of Pascal in this regard as well, allowing us to place the latter’s famous “wager argument” in proper perspective:
      “In the first place, though his wager discussion is often called the ‘pragmatic argument,’ he is emphatically not offering an argument for the existence of God (…he regards the question of divine existence as outside the realm of rationally accessible knowledge). In the second place, and very importantly, he is not offering an argument designed to produce immediate assent or faith in the claims of religion; in this sense, the image of placing a bet, an instantaneous act of putting down the chips, is misleading. Rather, he envisages faith as the destination—one to be reached by means of a long road of religious praxis; considerations about happiness are simply introduced as a motive for embarking on that journey.”
      I hope this will suffice to entice others to consider Cottingham’s brief on behalf of the primary importance of religious praxis, one that does not ignore the cognitive dimension of religion but attempts rather to remove it from its pride of place in the philosophical study of religion. Perhaps ironically, while Cottingham’s analysis takes place largely within the context of Christian traditions, where Christian “believers” have accorded creedal beliefs a comparatively strong historical role (e.g., the Nicene Creed, atonement doctrines, etc.) in contrast to the history of non-theistic worldviews outside Western civilization, his argument is even more pertinent to an examination of “spiritual” traditions from “the East:” Daoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism, for example.
      [1] If I recall correctly, I cited and recommended this book once before in a blog post by Jon Cogburn.
      [2] For a similar treatment of this notion of “spirituality,” see John Haldane’s article, “On the very idea of spiritual values,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 53-71.

      Like

      Reply
    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      DZ Phillips developed a pretty sophisticated version of such a view (and also had a pretty good critique of Plantinga). John Whittaker has developed it further by actually showing how it makes sense of contemplative traditions in various religions.
      I don’t think I buy it at the end of the day, because I think there has to be some kind of inchoate object of the hope. At the very least I think you have to hope for a real reconciliation in the world. A reconciliation that would somehow actually justify all of the horror. Quentin Meillassoux’s paradoxical theodicy is quite brilliant on this point, I think. And the religious practices must help you to be an agent of reconciliation yourself.
      I realize that these things are central to the Reformed tradition though, so other religious people might see things differently.

      Like

      Reply
    5. Jay Odenbaugh Avatar
      Jay Odenbaugh

      Jon, Thanks for directing me to DZ Phillips. I am very, very roughly familiar with his approach. Is there any particular work that you think best exemplifies his account?

      Like

      Reply

    Leave a comment