Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?While finding that text from George Eliot on the web (since I no longer have the library's copy of Hitchens's book), I came upon this interesting bit on ethical arguments against religion in Victorian Britain:
...Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood...So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.
As David J. DeLaura and a number of other historians of Victorian intellectual life have pointed out, many Victorian atheists and agnostics abandoned Christianity for a particularly Victorian reason: They found it immoral!Rev. Cumming seems not to have abandoned Christianity, but rather championed it, or at least some of its parts that weren't Roman Catholic.
The loss of religious faith in such representative early Victorian aginostics as F. W. Newman (John Henry Newman's brother), J. A. Froude (brother of Newman's close friend, Hurrell Froude), and George Eliot was not due, in the first place, to the usually suggested reasons—the rise of evolutionary theory in geology and biology and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Indeed, in each life the dominant factor was a growing repugnance toward the ethical implications of what each had been taught to believe as essential Christianity—especially the set of interrelated doctrines: Original Sin, Reprobation, Baptismal Regeneration, Vicarious Atonement, Eternal Punishment. [p. 13 of DeLaura's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969]George MacDonald, for example, left his Congregationalist pulpit because he could not accept that God would damn for all eternity babies who had not been baptised before their death, and similar repugnance proved the straw that broke the camel's back for Ruskin. In St. Paul and Protestantism, Arnold "contemptuously rejects the 'monstrous' vision of a capricious God who deals in election and predestination and cruelly emphasizes the crass commercial quality of the Puritan catchwords, 'covenant,' 'ransom,' 'redeem,' 'purchase,' 'bargain.'"
To my probably deserved embarrassment, I'd never heard of Rebecca Goldstein. But I've heard of her now, from my intellectual alter ego Sam Harris, in an email from samharris.org:New Novel about the New Atheism: Rebecca Goldstein's, 36 Arguments for the Existence of GodI get from these recommendations the same thrill that I got from the ad I saw (in 2005?) in The New York Times Book Review for Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I knew it would speak to me on my own wavelength.
"So extravagantly witty and smart that it's making everything else I've read recently seem drab."
—Ron Charles, Senior Editor at The Washington Post Book Review
"Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas."
—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams [an excellent work, which I have read; by the way, Lightman is on the MIT faculty, along with Goldstein's husband, linguist Steven Pinker]
"You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something."
—Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great [ditto]
"Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read."
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated [not yet]
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And the list of Goldstein's publications is intellectually provocative. From a research university's online library catalog:Goldstein, Rebecca, 1950-An Ian McEwan-class novelist? I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation, having this morning requested Properties of Light from my local library.
Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity
New York : Nextbook : Schocken, c2006. [Spinoza!]
The dark sister
New York, NY : Viking, 1991. [according to Wikipedia, "a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James"]
Incompleteness : the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel
New York : W.W. Norton, c2005. [a filched book about Gödel's incompleteness theorem graced my summer of 1965]
The late-summer passion of a woman of mind
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1989.
Mazel
New York : Viking, 1995.
The mind-body problem : a novel
New York : Random House, c1983. [don't you worry about this too?]
Properties of light : a novel of love, betrayal and quantum physics
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [let me know if you can explain quantum physics to me]
Strange attractors
New York : Viking, 1993.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God sounds like some excellent "talk about faith," possibly of the sort Russ Douthat had in mind in his op-ed piece, "Let's Talk about Faith", in Sunday's New York Times:When liberal democracy was forged, in the wake of Western Europe’s religious wars, this sort of peaceful theological debate is exactly what it promised to deliver. And the differences between religions are worth debating. Theology has consequences: It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them.
With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone's ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)Errol Eustace Harris (February 19, 1908 – June 21, 2009) was a contemporary South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.My reading this year has been curiously interconnected. In Frank Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, I read a good deal of his dealings with Cecil Rhodes, whose money founded the university in South Africa from which Professor Harris earned his bachelor's degree. Then, in the course of reading Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, I learned that Professor Harris had himself written books on Spinoza: Salvation from Despair, A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973), Spinoza's Philosophy, an Outline (1992), and The Substance of Spinoza (1995). These books are of course now on my reading list.
I "postscripted" him the paragraph from Wikipedia and asked whether he knew Harris. He answered that:We were good friends for many years, he contributed to my Festschrift, The Recovery of Philosophy In America, and we took part together in numerous philosophical symposia, etc. He wrote an excellent book on Hegel's Logic. I lost touch with him after I retired and did not know where he was. I did not know that he had passed away; the 101 does not surprise me.How extraordinary! And what a kind and distinguished man Professor Smith is too. I am delighted, honored to be in touch with him.
Apropos my recent interchanges with some "Bible-believing Christians," I was struck by a paragraph in Chapter 7 of Antonio R. Damasio's book I quoted from yesterday:For the [kind of salvation accessible to all through living "a virtuous life in a virtuous civitas, obedient to the rules of a democratic state and mindful of God's nature, somewhat indirectly, with the help of some of the Bible's wisdom"], Spinoza rejects biblical narratives as God's revelation, but endorses the wisdom embodied in the historical figures of Moses and Christ. Spinoza saw the Bible as a repository of valuable knowledge regarding human conduct and civil organization. [p. 274]Spinoza, this atheist with respect to the God of Abraham, was nevertheless plugging the Bible as a force for good in human affairs! (I wonder what the past two thousand years would have been like without the Bible. Too bad that that experiment can't be conducted.) The endnote was even more striking:
Here are Spinoza's words from A Theologico-political Treatise, 1670 (R. H. M. Elwes translation): "Before I go further I would expressly state (though I have said it before) that I consider the utility and the need for Holy Scripture or Revelation to be very great. For as we cannot perceive by the natural light of reason that simple obedience is the path of salvation, and are taught by revelation only that it is so by the special grace of God, which our reason cannot attain, it follows that the Bible has brought a very great consolation to mankind. All are able to obey, whereas there are but very few, compared with the aggregate of humanity, who can acquire the habit of virtue under the unaided guidance of reason. Thus if we had not the testimony of Scripture, we should doubt of the salvation of nearly all men."That stung me into self-awareness. As I was mocking my colleagues' religious beliefs last week, I knew I was doing it and didn't like that I was doing it, but I felt a sort of compulsion to proceed. I'd like to think now that if I'd read this from Damasio beforehand, I'd have held back, tried to emulate Spinoza. What was my need to not just smile and ignore their "sales pitches" but to ridicule and demean them? Why did I need to do that?
This deeply felt attitude gives the lie to the caricatures of Spinoza as the devil incarnate. Late Spinoza advised those around him, who were mostly Christian, to remain within their church, largely the Protestant church. He urged children to attend Mass, and he himself heard sermons by Colerus, the Lutheran pastor who moved into the house Spinoza once rented in the Stilleverkade and became first his friend, then his biographer. Spinoza did not have faith in a provident God or in eternal life, but he never mocked the faith of others. In fact, Spinoza was extremely careful with the faith of the unlearned. He only discussed religion with his intellectual colleagues....[p. 330]
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003) explores, among other things, the role of feelings in ethics and other social arrangements. Damasio brings the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) into the discussion because of his profound insights into the subject in his Ethics (Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding [Tractatus de intellectus emendatione])1.God has not revealed himself to humans in the ways portrayed in the Bible. You cannot pray to Spinoza's God. [p. 273]Ethics derived from biology, from feeling. Damasio quotes Proposition 18 in Part IV of Spinoza's Ethics:
"...the very first foundation of virtue is the endeavor (conatum) to preserve the individual self, and happiness consists in the human capacity to preserve its self2"...._______________
At first glance the words sound like a prescription for the selfish culture of our times but nothing could be further from their real meaning. As I interpret it, the proposition is a cornerstone for a generous ethical system. It is an affirmation that at the base of whatever rules of behavior we may ask humanity to follow, there is something inalienable: A living organism, known to its owner because the owner's mind has constructed a self, has a natural tendency to preserve its own life; and that same organism's state of optimal functioning, subsumed by the concept of joy, results from the successful endeavor to endure and prevail. Paraphrased in deeply American terms I would rewrite Spinoza's proposition as follows: I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created such that they tend to preserve their life and seek well-being, that their happiness comes from the successful endeavor to do so, and that the foundation of virtue rests on these facts. Perhaps these resonances are not a coincidence. [pp. 170-171]
Spinoza's best-known recommendation for achieving a life well lived came in the form of a system for ethical behavior and a prescription for a democratic state. But Spinoza did not think that following ethical rules and the laws of a democratic state would be sufficient for the individual to achieve the highest form of contentment, the sustained joy that he equates with human salvation....Many human beings require something that involves, at the very least, some clarity about the meaning of one's life....
...the yearning is a deep trait of the human mind. It is rooted in human brain design and the genetic pool that begets it, no less so than the deep traits that drive us with great curiosity toward a systematic exploration of our own being and of the world around it...The same natural endeavor of self-preservation that Spinoza articulates so transparently as an essence of our beings, the conatus, is called into action when we are confronted with the reality of suffering and especially the reality of death, actual or anticipated, our own or that of those we love....
...From this perspective, any project for human salvation—any project capable of turning a life examined into a life contented—must include ways to resist the anguish conjured up by suffering and death, cancel it, and substitute joy instead3....[pp. 268-271]
You need not be in fear of...God because he will never punish you. Nor should you work hard in the hope of getting rewards from him because none will come. The only thing you may fear is your own behavior. When you fail to be less than kind to others, you punish yourself, there and then, and deny yourself the opportunity to achieve inner peace and happiness, there and then....Spinoza's salvation—salus—is about repeated occasions of a kind of happiness that cumulatively make for a healthy mental condition....[p. 273]
Montesquieu's views on ethics, God, organized religion, and politics are through and through Spinozian and were, unsurprisingly, denounced as such. [p. 256]
