People sometimes argue back and forth about whether religious belief is a good thing, because it induces believers to be moral or charitable. In a big-picture sense, I think arguments of this form completely miss the point; beliefs should be judged on whether they are correct or incorrect, not on whether they cause people to do good or bad things. (If the belief is not correct, but it makes people do something good, can we say they’ve been tricked into acting that way?) Certainly, nobody is going to convince me to believe something if they admit that it’s false, but it would be good for me to believe — recommendations of that sort are usually aimed at other people, not the one handing them out. Besides which, as a matter of historical record it’s pretty clear that religion has led people to do some really good things and also led people to do some really bad things, and trying to weigh the effects on some imaginary scales seems just hopeless. Or at least, an interesting and possibly never-ending source of discussion for sociologists and historians of religion, but fortunately orthogonal to questions of the truth or falsity of religious claims.
Still, I confess to being a bit amused by the news that, in the last years of her life, Mother Teresa didn’t believe in God. (Via Cynical-C.) Letters that she wrote have now been released as part of a book project, and they are shot through with serious doubts.
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.
“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”
Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.
“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.
As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.
“What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”
I’m not someone who has strong feelings about Mother Teresa either way, and it seems sad that her doubts put her in such apparent torment. (To the extent that these letters paint a reliable picture at all, of course.) And, in the department of “things that are perfectly obvious but must nevertheless be said explicitly because it’s the internet,” this is only one individual case, from which no grand conclusions should be drawn. Except the obvious: motivations for altruistic and charitable behavior can be very complicated. We should keep them separate from our attempts to understand how the universe works.
But this raises different questions (not including the question of “why the bad source?”).
Do people of faith do better acts then people without faith? http://oproject.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/american-atheists-appear-to-be-less-likely-to-vote-and-volunteer-and-give-less-to-charity/
The answer is a resounding YES. As a person without faith, this is interesting to me. When a person genuinely believes in a person’s soul and and afterlife, they do greater works of charity. I think that this is something to be respected and taken into consideration more often.
I must admit, I admire those who do good without believing in God or afterlife: they don’t think they’ll get any “reward” for doing it.
PS: Jason Dick (and others making similar points): Just how clear is the definition of “irrational” above and beyond strictly logical issues of syllogism and fallacy etc? Doesn’t it depend on what kind of World we have, it isn’t just something about pure insight inside the mind …
“beliefs should be judged on whether they are correct or incorrect, not on whether they cause people to do good or bad things. ”
Why?
Seems to me that beliefs should be chosen on their utility.
The assumption that a correct belief will have the greatest benefit seems, to me, to require the 18th century philosophical outlook that the purpose of research is to unravel God’s plan. It presupposes that there exists a perfect answer to our problems, which can be discovered through correctness.
So you would believe something you knew to be incorrect, if you thought it might increase “utility” (however that might be defined)? Or is this more advice for other people?
Lab Lemming: “beliefs should be chosen on their utility”
wah? that sounds very 1984 big brother to me. the purpose of research is to understand the truth of whatever you are studying, the facts, regardless of utility or person benefit.
do you want to believe something that isn’t true just because it will make you more useful (whatever that might mean)? if no, would you give others incorrect beliefs in order to make them more useful?
anyways, utility is subjective. who decides which beliefs are most “useful?” if it is the individual, how can they themselves decide to truly believe something that they know to be incorrect? if it isn’t the individual, then is it a dictator or preacher or parent…?
So I guess this news is taking her off the fast track for cannonization?
As for the whole belief vs religion thing… I always find it interesting when people of faith argue to me that you need to believe to have morals, because nothing is clearly stopping me from being an axe murderer if I don’t see the world per their exact world view (or something). Of course it’s obvious that what they’re trying to say is that they wouldn’t behave morally if they didn’t think someone was looking over their shoulder- in which case sure, knock yourself out, I’d rather you be a person with misguided beliefs than a psychopath.
The CBS Evening News story that Sean cites is rather lacking in detail. The version at Time.com is much better.
From reading this, I’m not sure it’s fair to say “in the last years of her life, Mother Teresa didn’t believe in God”. What seems clear is that she stopped having visions. In 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta, she had a vision of Christ, who called to her to quit teaching and work in the slums. Here’s an excerpt of this dialogue, which she later described to her archbishop:
This was apparently the first of a series of visions. In January 1948 she finally got permission from the archbishop to begin working in the slums of Calcutta. And then, the visions stopped.
She missed them terribly, and as time went on she began to despair. In 1953 she wrote to the archbishop: “Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.” In 1956 she wrote: “Such deep longing for God — and … repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. — [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.”
Apparently only two letters actually express doubts of the existence of god. The first is this:
The second is this:
All this seems much more like the pain of a spurned lover than any analytical questioning of the existence of god. I suspect she remained a mystic in the vein of Saint John of the Cross or Saint Teresa of Avila to the very end. In 1970, she wrote to Malcolm Muggeridge:
By the way, I’m not trying to make any sort of point about religion — just trying to shed some more light on an interesting story.
Hi John, trying to shed ‘light’ on the subject – I like it.
maybe the english word god is a masonic acronym for gnosis of dimensions
and the higgs field is the holy trinity, One of Three separate fields.
Science does not seek or pray for miracles, but new ‘revelations’
On This side of the veil – why not believe in things unseen – feelings – miracles – healing – If there is thunder on the mountain – a god speaks – someone is hearing!
I expect to find people of faith doing “good deeds” in order to secure their place in the afterlife, and I expect to find “humanists” doing this because, well, there but for the grace of “luck”, go I.
So, what?
And I agree with John Baez, this is no example for atheists to hold up as an example of how wonderful they all are.
I didn’t know this story about visions of Mother Theresa that John is reporting. But it’s interesting to note that Therese of Lisieux story, with whom I tried to draw a parallel, was very similar, and the similarity is still closer than I first thought. She had a vision of Virgin Mary when she was very young and seriously ill, and she was later convinced that she had recovered because of this vision. When her second illness was declared years later, and her psychotic father died, she was desparate that no vision hapened to her anymore. Her desparation seems to have a quite analogous origin.
About the rest of the discussion, this exchange looks very naive to me. After a traditional religious education, I studied physics, and I learned quite a bit about other sciences too, such as biology. It is clear to me that science is the only available source of reliable knowledge about the world. Previous attempts (especially indian philosophy, greek philosophy, monotheistic religions), only gave partial insights, sometimes surprisingly good ones, but never as firm as modern scientific knowledge. Genesis for instance is a rough approximation essentially saying that the world and its inhabitants had a story. Not a bad guess, but of course no sure knowledge. It is very clear to me that human beings are the random result of a blind evolutionary process, and thus can’t have a special role or status in this world. I personally do not believe that God can influence the course of particular events on earth, or wants to. In particular, I view the idea that presidents of the United States are inspired by God in their deed as completely absurd. However, this still does not make me an atheist. I think there is still room for faith, if you consider that all this could simply not exist. Human destiny is materially insignificant at the cosmic scale, but despite this smallness, humans can get some knowledge about the world and its own smallness. So there is some greatness is mankind, in some paradoxical way, which I think is related to something transcendant, which you can call God if you will. Such a faith must be completely informed of the realities of science, and courageously look above and beyond them, not below, as some people do when they try to exploit temporary gaps in our scientific knowledge (which is what proponents of intelligent desing are trying to do). I do not see why I should sacrify faith to knowledge if I am intellectually free to avoid it. As you see I am not at all a mystic type as the various Therese and Theresa saints that we discussed above.
Sean,
in you previous post you suggested to argue
“in favor of a position with which you disagree”.
I understand that *this* post is your argument in favor of religion
and I think it is brilliant indeed.
Mother Theresa, working for the poor and struggling with God at
the same time. Can there be any words more powerfully expressing
the human desire to find and understand God, than the words of M.T.
as referenced by john above?
Can there be anything more subtle than God using an atheist to spread the word?
Just brilliant!
Sean: “beliefs should be judged on whether they are correct or incorrect, not on whether they cause people to do good or bad things.”
You state it as if self-evident. It is not. Nietzsche spends the entire first chapter of Beyond good and evil arguing that precise point: “Suppose we want truth. Why should we not prefer untruth?”
Let me quote a particularly strong passage:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil1.htm
Nietzsche, Beyond good and evil, 1) On the prejudices of philosophers:
“4
For us, the falsity of a judgment is no objection to that judgment—that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species—perhaps even creates species. And we are even ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong (3)) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live—that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life. To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A new philosophy which dared to do that would thus stand alone, beyond good and evil.”
—
I’m honestly curious, Sean, do you have a comment or any thoughts on this particular argument?
I thank Dr. Baez for his clarifying statements.
Given my own biases, and my read of the facts, the story seems to support the suspicion that some human brains are prone to unusual perceptions that are interpreted as genuine experiences of the numenous. The anxiety and sense of loss Mthr. Teresa endured after the visions reportedly stopped leave me with little doubt she sincerely believed she had had them, and that they were probably of an especially ecstatic variety. This leads me to an interesting question: Why did they stop? I note from her biographies that she experienced numerous chronic health problems later in life, including several heart attacks, and actually died of a massive heart attack and stroke. Doubtlessly, she suffered numerous viral and parasitic illnesses endemic to her usual environment, and those can infrequently cause damage to the myocardium and resultant impairment in function. But we can’t rule out coronary artery disease, and her heart attacks and stroke could certaily have been caused by atherosclerotic plaques and/or thromboemboli typical of more common forms of cardiovascular disease. She was far from overweight, clearly very physically active and so I find myself wondering if she had some congenital predisposition to cardiovascular disease, like maybe hypercholesterolemia. Perhaps. As many surely know, atherosclerosis, stenosis, and infarcts can occur not only in coronary arteries, but peripheral and intracranial as well (the latter can lead to strokes and vascular dementia, among other things).
Could progressive alterations in mental function caused by local or widespread decline in cerebral perfusion explain her perceptual changes, as well as her apparently depressive emotional state later in life?
Wild speculation on my part, but I find it interesting to consider, anyway…
wolfgang,
I don’t see how this is an argument for Christianity. I find it incredibly sad that she did struggle so hard to find God. I have no such desire, and neither do most atheists. Is there an innate human desire to find God? I sure hope not, because there isn’t one out there. After all, given Christian theology and all the work she did, you’d think that Mother Theresa, of all people, would have found God after years of struggling. She didn’t. Why, pray tell, would God want to hide from one so pious?
ThM wrote:
It is clear to me that science is the only available source of reliable knowledge about the world.
If we don’t get into quibbles about what “knowledge about the world” might mean, a necessary corollary is that in most spheres of life, we must deal with unreliable knowledge. This includes
– what other people think of one
– what offer to make to buy a house
– where to invest one’s savings
– which candidate to vote for in an election
– innumerable how-tos (ranging across how to play the guitar, how to bake a cake, how to hold an audience’s attention when speaking, etc., etc)
– in many, many cases, what is wrong to do and what is right to do
(We note that in the last two examples, often science can provide knowledge about how to and what would be right/wrong to do).
One must live in a rather empty world if one must work only with reliable knowledge (and hence reliable belief). It also seems to be a rather totalitarian world to me.
Arun, well said.
To quote another philosophical great:
“6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.”
– Wittgenstein, Tractatus
lol Jason, Why does Science continue to search for hidden things
Even after building the six billion dollar cathedral and much worshipping and praying, there is no guarantee holy ‘mass’ will force the ‘god’ particle to make an impromptu appearance.
ThM wrote:
It is clear to me that science is the only available source of reliable knowledge about the world.
Well, not quite, and there are problems with that perspective. First, you should include math as reliable. It isn’t really considered “science” to prove something about how to solve differential equations, however useful they may be in science. Also, it isn’t really clear how reliable scientific findings are, and their being as reliable as they are is mostly because the universe we have plays along (for whatever reason.) For example, the inverse square law for gravity has not been testing at very small distances/masses (like submillimeter, and like sizes of common matter.) Only recently, were tests done down to the mm range (and BTW held up the law, meaning some large-curled extra dimension theories were ruled out.) So, was it ever a proper, likely to be “reliable” inference, that the observed range of rules of gravitational attraction would hold up to very tiny or very large scales? Maybe. It depends on the theory, and on the “cooperation” of a universe that works like that, it isn’t inherently demanded by logic or “rationality” itself.
Many things that we routinely believe in rather firmly and consider the basis for reliable assertions are technically not accessible to true scientific confirmation. For example, the simple case of a conversation you had with someone yesterday or weeks or years ago. If not recorded, there is no clear evidence other than memory (so often fallible), and no way in practice or principle to check what was said. Yet we routinely talk about conversations without indulgence in apologies for assuming what can’t be proven. Perhaps even more importantly, few serious thinkers consider this grounds to pretend that there literally was not a distinct conversation etc. in the past – despite the violation of the (disingenuously wielded) positivist rule that meaningful claims should come with a method of verification.
Q9,
Nobody in science uses the term the “God particle”. And we’re not even that convinced that we’re going to find the Higgs boson. All that we can be sure of is that finding or not finding the Higgs at the LHC is going to give us some very interesting insights into fundamental physics. Finding the Higgs would be yet another confirmation of the as yet most accurate theory man has yet devised, while not finding it would force us to recognize that something is deeply wrong with this theory, and we have to come up with a theory that explains this fact.
Neither worship nor prayer have any part in science. It always amuses me how the religious try to bring science down to their level. Get over it. Science isn’t a religion. Science is nothing more and nothing less than the best method mankind has yet come up with for discerning truth from fiction.
Neil B.,
Nah, math doesn’t belong with science there. Yes, mathematics is highly reliable. As is formal logic (for the same reasons). The issue is that what he said was that “science is the only available source of reliable knowledge about the world,” which is a rather specific statement. Neither mathematics nor logic provide us with any knowledge about the world. What they provide us with are necessary conclusions given certain premises or axioms. It is up to us to discover whether those premises/axioms can be applied to the real world, and that requires science. Thus mathematics and logic become tools of science, that can be used as part of the method for finding more about the real world.
In no way am I attempting to claim here that science is somehow better, more honorable, or more useful than mathematics or logic. Mathematics and logic are very interesting fields in their own right, and have proven to be highly useful pursuits. But they don’t tell us anything about the real world without science.
You start out doing the possible – and suddenly – a spark – you find you are doing the impossible – How does it happen ? How does Carbon turn into life. It happens every day.
For years I’ve wondered how Ms. Bojaxhiu coped with hubris-inducing things like Time Magazine declaring her a “Living Saint”. Now we have an answer, seemingly more searing than St. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh”.
Special nod to ThM and John Baez for providing data here. This does make Christopher Hitchens’ allegations of fraudulence more interesting. However, to justify this post’s title and desired conclusions, one must demonstrate that she ceased to love Adonai Eloheynu with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength (see Luke 10:25-28 and what comes after). The record shows that she stayed faithful.
Stevie says:
“wah? that sounds very 1984 big brother to me. the purpose of research is to understand the truth of whatever you are studying, the facts, regardless of utility or person benefit.”
Bullshit. The new LHC is an obvious counter example. It is being built for utility- the ability to whack protons together at energies thusfar not observed in the lab. What the theorists can speculate on what it will reveal, for the scientists building it, the most important question is whether or not it will perform at spec. A huge amount of the world’s scientific research is utility-based, and all of the “truth” searching reqinstrumentation
Apologies for the above partial comment- aimed for shift, hit enter while editing…
Stevie says:
“wah? that sounds very 1984 big brother to me. the purpose of research is to understand the truth of whatever you are studying, the facts, regardless of utility or person benefit.”
Bullshit. Utility is a more common goal than truth. Where was the truth in the Manhattan or Apollo projects? The new LHC is another counter example. It is being built for utility- the ability to whack protons together at energies thusfar not observed in the lab. While the theorists can speculate on what it will reveal, for the scientists building it, the most important question is whether or not it will perform at spec. A huge amount of the world’s scientific research is utility-based, and all of the “truth” searching requires instrumentation that performs in a systematic and predictable manner.
But on a more basic level, I think that belief should be checked at the clean lab door with the outdoor shoes,
fh:
Seeing how Nietzche’s “philosophy beyond good and evil” actually just turned out to be a bigger badder flavour of evil, I reject his (and Sean’s) assumption that a reality-based philosophy is superior to a whimsical one.
Sean:
Belief in the absurd is something I aspire to, but have yet to perfect.