Meta-atheism, Death by Accident, and the Mysteries of Religious Experience
For some time I have been persuaded by Georges Rey’s account of meta-atheism. (Georges was one of my teachers at Maryland.) His claim is that many people who say they believe in God don’t really. It’s not that people are lying about what they really believe. It’s just that we’re often wrong about our own beliefs. (Our own beliefs are just another thing to have beliefs about, and we can get it wrong about our own beliefs just like we can get it wrong about anything else.)
This weekend, I had a thought which is a version of Georges’s point (6) in favor of meta-atheism. Here’s point (6):
(6) Betrayal by Reactions and Behavior People’s reactions and behavior (e.g. grief, mourning) do not seem seriously affected by their supposed “belief” in a Hereafter. Imagine a young “believing” couple. He is dying from a painful disease. Would she really rejoice at the prospect of his going to heaven, and of joining him herself when she dies, as though he’d just gone off for a great –eternal!- cure in a luxurious resort in Miami? I betcha she’d grieve and mourn “the loss” like anyone else. (Note that most all religious music and rituals surrounding death are deeply sad -seldom, if ever, joyous).
In a related vein, if people really believe in the efficacy of prayer, they should be willing to have the National Institute of Health do a controlled study of the effects of prayer, just as they would if they believed that soy beans cured cancer. (And why does no one expect prayer to cure wooden legs?)
Let it not be said that Georges is an ideal diplomat to the theistic community. Nevertheless, I believe his observations are sound.
In a fit of Beckerite rational choice reasoning, I decided that theists ought to have higher rates of death by accident. If I believe that heaven is infinite bliss, then I should be quite eager to join my maker. Suicide is a disqualification for paradise, but dying in a car accident isn’t. So, one should expect that theists who believe in perpetual Miami would take more risks than those who do not so believe, and that thus, death-by-accident ought to be higher among believer than non-believers.
My guess is that there is no difference in rates of death-by-accident among believers and non-believers. If my guess is correct, then there’s another reason to believe that many people don’t really believe in God, even though they think they do. Or, at least, there’s a reason for rational choice economists to believe meta-atheism.
All this was stimulated by a Ross Douthat post that touches on Orwell’s attitude toward a character in a Graham Greene novel. Orwell:
Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women . . .
Douthat:
If he really felt that adultery is a mortal sin, he would stop committing it. This is astonishingly obtuse, and something that could only be written by the most bloodless and Puritanical of Christians — or by a devout atheist like Orwell. For him, I suspect (and perhaps for Hitchens?), the always-upright Christian is fairly comprehensible: he has his dogmas and he lives by them, with the same lack of nuance, backsliding, and self-doubt that Orwell brought to his staunch unbelief. Whereas understanding the tormented Christian, the questing agnostic, the atheist who takes a gamble on God and the Catholic who commits suicide — the stock-in-trade of Greene’s great novels, in other words — requires an imaginative leap into religious experience that an atheistic critic is often ill-equipped to make.
The Orwell’s astonishing bit of obtuseness (”obtusity”?) is the core of Georges’ point (6) and my little Beckerite addendum. Is Georges obtuse on this point? Am I? Well, let’s concede the possibility of weakness of will. Discount rates won’t help here because no matter how sharply you discount infinite bliss, it’s still infinite. But if I truly believe the hype about my celestial reward, or my infernal punishment, how can I fail so utterly to align my actions with my incentives. Ross’s point makes it sound like it is obtuse to question the coherence of a character who truly and hosetly loves life, but flings himself from a rooftop anyway.
I submit that meta-atheism is the key to understanding the “nuance, backsliding, and self-doubt” that Ross sets out as central to the religious experience. Many of us believe that we believe because the social and psychological benefits of appearing to be a believer seem to us greater than the costs, and the most compelling way to appear a believer, but to avoid the behavioral costs of actual belief, is to earnestly but falsely believe that one believes.
Our “faith” is shaken when we find we cannot stop cheating on our wife, or whatever our transgression may be, because, on some level, we know that if we really believed what we believe we believed, cheating on our wife would be psychologically impossible — like peeling the skin off your screaming baby out of sheer boredom. Yet the general value of our self-deception is so high that we cast about looking to preserve it. If our religion is a good one, well-adapted to survive in the forbidding habitat of a human psyche, it will tell us that we are fundamentally and irremediably broken, flawed, and unsuited to virtue. And THAT explains why we can be so abjectly and arbitrarily irrational. So grateful are we for the explanation of the possibility of our misbehavior, and thus the possibility of retaining the deep benefits of religious conviction and a religious form of life, we redouble our faith in our faith, and our religion tightens it’s embrace on us we tighten our embrace on it.
February 2nd, 2005 19:31
I’m not quite sure I follow your car accident arguement, Will.
Death is one result of an accident, but you are more likely to spend the rest of your life horribly crippled. Also, your risky drive to Miami might injure or kill someone else, which, though I’m not religious, seems to me might get you banned from Miami altogether..
February 2nd, 2005 22:36
At least you can take some comfort that you’re making the same mistake as George Orwell.
Most observant believers don’t adhere to the religious moral imperative out of belief in the hereafter - Judaism has a pretty vague notion of the afterlife, without much sense of desert, if I’m correct.
Instead, the religious moral code is based on the idea that there is an inherent order to the cosmos that doesn’t correspond to the default nature of the human will. Devotional life is the process of retraining one’s will — wrestling it into harmony with the divine order. This applies to all sorts of religious doctrines, regardless of how much speculative carrot-and-stick they involve.
None of us knows how much time is allotted to us for this work, so we tend to guard life and limb about as vigilantly as the rest of y’all (not that I wouldn’t like to see the accident mortality survey that you speculate about…).
February 3rd, 2005 01:53
A secret, pantheistic mysticism disguised as orthodoxy is probably far more common than meta-atheism.
And I second Matt’s assertion that a lot of us ‘religious types’ don’t worry much about the next world.
We’re in this one for a reason.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
One world at a time.
February 3rd, 2005 07:15
Revealed Atheism
Will Wilkinson has some interesting thoughts on how the behaviour of soi-disant theists implies an (unacknowledged) atheism: In a fit of Beckerite rational choice reasoning, I decided that theists ought to have higher rates of death by accident. If I
February 3rd, 2005 09:22
I understand there’s little word of an afterlife in Judaism, but if you’re Christian, then shouldn’t you worry about the next world? Unless you’re self-conscious about putting yourself on, I guess.
February 3rd, 2005 10:05
How is it that you have beliefs about beliefs? Did you perform some sort of phenomenological reduction that I missed? I suspect that peoples views and beliefs are in a state of happy imprecision.
February 3rd, 2005 10:11
Sure - if you’re a Christian, you ought to believe in the eternal reward and behave accordingly. And I admit that I’m quite “self-conscious about putting myself on.” Frankly, it feels weird and counterintuitive, which is why I have a hard time with your assertion that I actually just beleive that I beleive. Because in fact, I don’t even believe that I believe correctly, dig?
But look at the different things that have to be in place to really yield the kind of Christian that you and Orwell imagine:
1) Total belief in the reward of heaven and corresponding punishment of damnation, or at least enough certainty to think of it as the best bet
2) Precise understanding of the behavior required to attain that reward
3) Comprehensive self-scrutiny and self-awareness
4) The self-discipline required to implement all of #2 in light of #3
I understand your point to be that, given #1, there ought to be no self-discipline required, since the apparent reward is so great. In Orwell’s words, “If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it.”
But the “nuance and backsliding” that Ross is talking about are our failures to attain all four of the above criteria. I don’t have to be filled with a cringing self-loathing to view those things as difficult, and I really don’t see “meta-atheism” as explaining anything that can’t be accounted for by the limits of human discernment, prudence, and will.
February 3rd, 2005 10:50
This post caught my eye earlier but I was thinking about this again, aren’t you conflating two separate beliefs here?
1) That there is a God
2) That there is an afterlife (of presumably infinite bliss)
The latter doesn’t automatically follow from the former, yet what is revealed by the behaviour described is an unacknowledged scepticism of the prospect of an afterlife (entry to which is presumably based on conforming to certain standards of behaviour) rather than meta-atheism as such. This would tie in with the fact that for believers, existence itself is “proof” of a Creator*, while the afterlife portion must be taken on “faith”.
*Note, I don’t buy this at all myself, I am a convinced atheist, but it has the same ring of plausibility to many people as the notion that animals are capable of reflective thought.
February 3rd, 2005 11:13
Matt, I think you’re really making it harder than it should be. Suppose you truly believe that if you push the big red button in front of you two things will happen: (1) You can have your way with Salma Hayek immediately thereafter and; (2) You will be subjected to excruciating torture every minute for the next year, starting tomorrow, and at the end of the year you will be killed. DO YOU PUSH THE BUTTON? I guess it’s a question of discernment, prudence, and will, but Salma Hayek’s not that great, right?
February 3rd, 2005 12:34
In your red button example, can I feel and smell the hot coals over which I’ll have to walk while listening to “We Built This City?” In other words, is the threat of punishment as credible as the apparent short-term reward?
By your definition, I don’t truly believe in eternal reward or punishment. In spite of myself and my religious inclinations, my own belief in the hereafter isn’t concrete enough to really influence my behavior in the here and now.
Your vision of the frustrated believer demands that I concoct layers of meta-belief in order to come to terms with my incomplete faith in the hereafter. Instead, I admit that it’s not strong enough to dictate my actions.
I think we both draw the same conclusions about the behavior we could predict out of someone who truly and completely believes in eternal reward. After all, plenty of such people provide an example as they blow themselves up in Iraq every week.
The rest of us make do with what we admit to be an incomplete faith in the hereafter. That’s not so complicated, but not as simplistic as the red button.
February 3rd, 2005 12:43
Will,
If Salma Hayek was performing a strip tease right next to the red button, I bet a substantial portion of men actually would push it. Because, well, Salma Hayek is really hot, and it takes a lot of willpower to turn her down.
There are all sorts of lesser examples of this sort of behavior– alcoholics who try to quit and relapse, despite knowing exactly what awaits them if they start drinking again. People who have unprotected sex with strangers despite the knowledge that pregnancy and STD’s could result. People who eat too much Thanksgiving dinner despite the knowledge that they’ll feel sick afterwards. Girls who keep buying clothes they don’t need with credit cards they can’t afford to pay off, despite the knowledge that they’re destroying their credit and risking bankruptcy.
People simply don’t posess the capacity to behave in a way that reflects perfectly consistent intertemporal preferences. Many of the people I cite above know perfectly well the bad fates that await them for their poor choices. It’s just that at the time, Salma Hayek’s heaving bosom seems more urgent than whatever might happen the following day.
February 3rd, 2005 12:52
This sounds like another variation on the “No intelligent person could disagree with me, so if you’re intelligent and you say you disagree with me you must be lying” theme. Perhaps “meta-atheism” is supposed to be academese for what people of faith have for centuries quaintly referred to as “doubt.”
February 3rd, 2005 12:56
But if you are %100 confident you will be heinously tortured for a year starting tomorrow and you don’t believe there is any way to escape it?
I of all people understand lack of discipline and lapses of prudence. But discipline and prudence tend to improve when the cost of not improving is very very high. If you genuinely believe the cost is infinitely high (and not simply believe that you believe), I simply cannot buy the idea that, because of lack of discipline, foresight, and prudence, this belief might turn out to have only a marginal effect on one’s behavior. I think the hypothesis that these people don’t really have this belief is a much more persuasive, and much more charitable, explanation than that they are are completely and utterly irrational. If you think incentives matter at all, and that you can understand something about human behavior by understanding incentives, you ought to be eager to avoid the idea that we might systematically fail to heed even massive incentives because of irrationality.
February 3rd, 2005 13:01
understanding theistic self-preservation
check out will wilkinson’s exploratory post on Georges Rey’s argument for meta-atheism. basically, the argument goes that our behavior belies our beliefs (though read more of Will’s argument and Rey’s original for the full scoop).
though i cer…
February 3rd, 2005 13:10
Will -
Why do you have to assume that every believer is 100% certain of the afterlife? As I said above - we agree on the kind of behavior that one could predict from someone like that.
If the concept of religious doubt is really all this new to you, those Mormons you grew up with must have really kept their eyes on the prize better than I do.
February 3rd, 2005 15:47
The mind boggles at the implications of having some other person be more of an expert at your own thought life than you are. So Winston really did love Big Brother the whole time, after all?
(As an aside, it’s particularly delicious to see a discussion framed around the idea that some method exists to prove one’s beliefs and thoughts wrong, and recruit Orwell to support such a thesis.)
As for the rest, I suppose I disagree with the premises:
- I have been to funerals–several, actually–where joyful songs were played, often at the request of the family or the deceased.
- I have also seen people weep and mourn at the airport when their loved ones leave on long trips. Is this, too, irrational, seeing as the probable result will be only a short separation? If not, then why is it irrational to mourn separations that may last years or decades, but not to mourn separations that only last days or weeks?
(One wonders whether statisticians, upon mourning the departure of their spouses on long trips, could be said to have committed treason against their own profession!)
- There is belief in an abstract God, and the resulting foolish behavior that may imply, and there is faith in a rather concrete idea of God, which might include moral strictures against foolish behavior, senses of purpose on this earth, faith that God is the best judge of whether one should continue to live, etc. I fail to see any way that the latter faith is somehow invalid.
- On sin, I suppose someone who has never violated his or her own moral code in a moment of weakness might see such a rationale as plausible. But I think the rest of us, who know just how capable we are of acting irrationally whatever our creed, might be a little more skeptical. Count me among the latter group.
- Finally, I think this essay proves fairly well that economics is no more a universal theory of knowledge than any of the other candidates frequently nominated for the job.
Of course, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt, as I have not independently confirmed my own beliefs.
February 3rd, 2005 16:13
I don’t think this type of thinking is limited to religion. By any objective measure, Bush’s first term was a pretty bad presidency, yet he got re-upped. I doubt few people who voted for him really believe his second term will end with a booming economy and democracy in Iraq.
I would suggest another process of belief: fanboyism.
By coincidence, Star Trek:Enterprise was cancelled this morning. I have a modest interest in ST:E, I watch the show and frequent several fansites. I was always amazed that after watching an hour of some of the worst Sci-Fi ever put on TV, polls on the ST:E fansites that rated the crapfest I just watched would tend to rate every single episode in the A-A+ range.
Like Prof. Rey, I had to believe that, in their heart of hearts, the fanboys rating Enterprise episodes that were just badly acted ripoffs of previous ST shows, were truly bad…but no, they seemed to truly think each episode made Blade Runner and 2001 look like bad cartoons.
The term fanboy comes from fan, which in turn came from the word fanatic…
February 3rd, 2005 16:36
Matt:
The point is that the fate of eternal (eternal!) suffering is so horrible that your faith must be very “incomplete” indeed, incomplete to the point of triviality, if it does not prevent you from behaving in ways that, according to the faith, lead to that fate.
February 3rd, 2005 17:16
Hell isn’t Christian, necessarily.
The name “Hel” belonged to the Norse goddess of the underworld. Like Yule logs, mistletoe, and bunny eggs, it’s now part of the larger, mainstream, Christian cultural tradition.
The afterlife was not, originally, a central point of concern for Christians.
(What is and always was?
Love.
With a capital “L.”)
Nor is there, to this day, any ecumenical consensus on what happens to a Christian after death.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and some others who pride themselves on their biblical literalism, believe we all die, full stop. Just stone dead, like an atheist would think.
At some future time, the Lord will return, Heaven and Earth will pass away, and the righteous dead will be raised into new life.
The unrighteous will just stay dead forever.
The Catholics have their “Purgatory,” which mitigates their fear of ‘damnation.’
The Calvinists think it’s all ‘predestined’ anyhow. And so on….
The passages where Jesus speaks of the Lake of Fire, Sheol, or Gehenna are, like the rest of His parables and aphorisms, not normally regarded as flat statements of plain and simple fact.
For what it’s worth: I, as a Christian, have faith that God created me, God will kill me whenever He pleases, and I’m happy for God to save whatever aspects of me are worth saving, destroy the rest, and send whatever subsequently constitutes “me” wherever He sees fit, seeing as how He has a better handle on what’s best than I do.
So I just don’t worry my pretty little head about the afterworld.
At the risk of belittling some of my more fervently pious co-religionists, I’d agree that people who claim to believe in eternal damnation, yet don’t act like it, are either lying to you, lying to themselves, or just fucking bat-shit crazy.
February 3rd, 2005 17:23
I think the question isn’t so much whether the belief in God (or even afterlife) is real, but whether the belief in the inescapability of the punishment is. And in the Christian theology I’m familiar with, committing adultery (for example) isn’t an instant one-way ticket to hell; it’s something you can repent of.
People fail to act in accordance with their belief in an afterlife in the exact same way as they fail to act in accordance with their belief that, say, reckless driving may result in death - we’re not very good at evaluating less-than-immediate risks.
February 3rd, 2005 20:20
Death and Onions
But although the idea of meta-atheism is easy, its interpretation is hard. I think the moral is not that we need more bracing cleareyed honesty, but that it’s a good thing we have so little. It is both churlish and inaccurate to call such false beliefs…
February 4th, 2005 00:30
fatalism is probably a greater factor in terms of motivating/ psychological causal factors when it comes to religion and human behaviour. when you believe god has a plan you just don’t try so hard to survive/think your way out of potentially fatal accidents ie. your car rolling over etc. as it must be happening for a PURPOSE. this would translate in to higher rates of accidental deaths among believers (most likely calvinists and possibly muslims). there has been some research on this and it seems to bear out the hypothesis.
February 4th, 2005 01:46
Check these guys out
A better place to start than Will’s traffic accidents
February 4th, 2005 09:17
MB, AirBornAgain! Perfect!
February 6th, 2005 11:24
Re your car accident hypothesis: I would expect a disparity. Religious people are more cautious, at least in the US. Perhaps they fear being accountable to a deity!
February 16th, 2005 10:02
Do theists hold that suicide disqualifies one from paradise?
February 16th, 2005 12:54
Should people who believe in God have higher accident rates?
Will Wilkinson says yes, since they should be eager to get to paradise. The ever-insightful Tyler Cowen says no, since they believe they have a part in God’s plan. I say no, since there is no additional payoff to dying quickly! What, after all, is the …
February 17th, 2005 00:36
Depends on the theist.
I don’t, others do.
February 17th, 2005 00:55
First, you are using an incredibly broad term, “theist”, for a fairly specific presumed set of beliefs which you then attempt to force upon the entire original set. From reading your later posts, it appears that you are talking about some pseudo-Christian beliefs involving eternal, infinite, unavoidable punishment for sin X, but otherwise a very high probability (or even certainty) of eternal bliss.
I am not afraid of death or any part of the world to come. But I do place an extremely high value on life–and not only my own. Because my god instructs me, “choose life.” Since he’s so cool, I place a high value on his pleasure. I understand that he derives pleasure from my obedience. So I choose life.
I have chosen not to skydive (although that would be SUPER cool) because my value of the loss suffered by my family should something go wrong so high. Am I afraid? Am I irrational? Am I deceiving myself?
I am likewise not cavilier about this incredible gift of life.
===============================
As for the question of autocide, opinions vary almost at the individual level. (I have read disagreements within Jewish and Christian denominations–my limited area of knowlege.) Almost all consider madness-induced suicide to be tragic but not of moral consequence. Otherwise, all agree it is a great sin, but most tend to agree that it is not unpardonable.
If you are familiar with the predestination/free will issue, then you can understand that some believe that autocide reveals that you were never “saved” or “elect” in the first place.
Jesus was quite plain about there being degrees of reward and punishment. All Christians who receive this agree that autocide is a bad thing, and there will be reprocussions, barring the above.
February 17th, 2005 02:58
“Party in the city where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
Welcome to Miami
‘Buenvenidos a Miami’
Bouncin in the club where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
I’m goin to Miami
‘Welcome to Miami’”
February 18th, 2005 03:04
I really don’t understand this at all, frankly. Most mainstream Christians _do not_ believe that they will go to Hell for adultery.
I mean, I can’t put it any plainer. Saying a Christian can go to Hell for any particular sin’s not the best theology, and it’s absolute anethema to the generic Born Again.
Regardless of the mildly bizzare assertion that people can’t act against their best interest, the central thesis here seems, to me, to be 100% wrong.
I sin daily (at least) and though I’ve been dissappointed in myself, I’ve never once imagined God was warming up the coals.
July 5th, 2005 21:52
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March 12th, 2007 17:52
Strange article, and stranger answers. It doesn’t deal with the obvious answer, that is, ¿what do you mean by “believe”?. We believe a lot of things, some of them absolutely, some of them much less so. My belief in the existence of this computer, for example, is of a totally different quality that my beliefs in the nature of the universe, or my political beliefs, and still, you don’t say that I don’t really believe in them. Most christians probably don’t believe in God in the absolute way that Will seems to assume. Their beliefs are mixed with doubt, hope, etc. and it’s completely logical, after all.¿Wouldn’t you have at least some small doubt about the existence of an invisible all-powerful entity?. But there are historical examples of people who believed absolutely in God; early Christians, for example, displayed that kind of belief, and martyrdom became so popular that the Pope decreed that only those who weren’t seeking their own death were martyrs.