The limits of trying to speculate about God

Enlightened thinking?
Simon Blackburn considers the limits of trying to speculate about God
Gone, evidently, are the days when religions could be left quietly to sink, fatally holed beneath the waterline by philosophical scepticism, evidence of historical unreliability, and a liberal distaste for authoritarian yet apparently arbitrary commands and prohibitions. In those days Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and many others were credited with firing the sceptical torpedo, historians had fired the second, and sociologists and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim, together with a newly liberal moral climate, had fired the third.

A religion, according to Durkheim, is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”. In other words it is human beings who manufacture religions, as practices that turn a morally lawless mob into a congregation, with a shared sense of what can and cannot be done. In this description Durkheim is not saying whether it is a good or bad thing that we go in for these practices, for they are too much part of social life for us to draw up a cost–benefit account. But it is clearly a dangerous thing, liable to fetishize the difference between those who go in for what Hume called frivolous observances, and others who do not.

Of course it would not be a frivolous matter that there be such observances, if they are indeed necessary to turn a mob into a society, even if it is arbitrary what form they take at different places and times. But are they necessary? Enlightened self-interest should be enough to explain the emergence of the normal conventions and norms whereby we live, without any aid from ritual, rules, mysteries and maledictions. Nevertheless, even if we accept coins of the realm and obey the rules of grammar without visions of rewards in heaven, or fear of hellfire, there is no doubt that zealotry beefs up tribal solidarity, stiffens military ardour, and above all generates convictions of unique righteousness...

SIMON BLACKBURN
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