Discussing the Idea of a God

What do we mean by the word God? Ask a random hundred Americans. About sixty will believe in a personal god, 25 will believe in an impersonal force, seven won’t know which, and eight won’t believe in either.

Then ask a random hundred Europeans, and it gets even more ambiguous.

Only about forty will believe in a personal god, up to 33 will believe in a spirit or life force, fifteen won’t know which, and twelve will believe there is neither.

These figures are based on research by the Pew Forum and World Values Surveys. But the exact figures are not important. My point is that we cannot assume that the phrase “I believe in God” means anything like the same thing to each person who says it.

Same labels, different ideas

So what might “a personal god” be? Is it a god who is also a person, or a god who is in some way personal to you? Are the different variations of “god as an impersonal force” just attaching the label “god” to completely different ideas? Can we discuss these other ideas more effectively by removing the label “god” from them?

To complicate things further, many people also attach different meanings to other related words: belief, certainty, doubt, faith, truth, knowledge, evidence, proof, religion, theist, deist, atheist, agnostic, good, bad, evil, right and wrong. What do each of these words mean? Again, it depends.

As a unit of language, each word has at least three types of meaning: (a) its common meaning in general public discourse, which evolves over time and is recorded in reputable dictionaries; (b) one or more specialised meanings that people agree to use in fields like philosophy or in private groups; and (c) any number of contextual nuances of any of these meanings.

Then we each filter these meanings through at least three personal screens: (d) the meaning we each prefer to attach to the word, and how important that meaning is to us; (e) the meaning we each intend to convey when we use the word; and (f) the meaning that we each receive when we hear or read the word.

Discussing the idea of a God

In ordinary conversation, most of us assume the default meaning of a word to be some variation of its common meaning as used in general public discourse. But when we discuss the idea of a god, or many related ideas, we cannot make this assumption.

So we should agree to either clarify our respective definitions, or ideally use shared definitions, and then move on to discussing the ideas behind the labels. Otherwise, many crucial words will be reduced to meaning, for each of us, only “this-word-as-I-personally-define-the-word”.

Then we will each seem to agree with propositions that we reject as false, we will each waste our time disputing propositions that we accept as true, and we will never reach the stage of discussing what we actually mean.

Sources

The Pew Forum Religious Landscape Survey was conducted in 2007, in the continental United States, by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, on behalf of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The results are based on interviews in English and Spanish with 35,556 Americans aged 18 and older.

The World Values Surveys were conducted in four waves from 1990 to 2005, in over eighty countries spanning all six inhabited continents, by a network of social scientists at leading universities around the world. The question on personal god versus spirit or life force was asked of 27,622 people in thirty European countries between 1999 and 2005.

Image: Pantheon of Gods by Grizzli (cc)

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Atheist Ireland Radio Interview

Earlier this week, I was a guest of Simon Maher (pictured here) on the Dublin radio station Phantom 105.2 FM, where we discussed atheism in Ireland, in the context of the UK atheist bus adverts, and the formation of the new advocacy group Atheist Ireland.

Here’s a recording of the interview, and a complete transcript.

Recording

You can listen to the interview here.

Atheists in Ireland

Simon Maher: We were talking last week about the atheist bus campaign in England, where there are advertising posters saying ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ And it got us talking generally about religion and atheism, and we said let’s try and apply it to an Irish context. And luckily enough there is a man called Michael Nugent who is a well known blogger at michaelnugent.com, where he writes about happiness, atheism and life, and a man who we’ve tallked to before here on Phantom Daily, and he joins us here in the studio. Good afternoon, Michael. Good to have you with us in the studio today.

Michael Nugent: Good afternoon. It’s nice to be here enjoying life and not worrying.

SM: Good. That’s a good start. I suppose the question we asked people when we talked about the feature last week was how the poster campaign might go down if it was to happen on buses trundling around the streets of Dublin?

MN: Well, I think there’s an awful lot of people in Ireland who aren’t particularly religious. We don’t go about shouting about it a lot, despite the temptation to do so given the way that non-religious people are treated by default here. But if you look at the last census, there are almost 190,000 people who said that they had no religion. And then there’s another 60,000 people who didn’t answer the question. So you have about a quarter of a million people who either said they have no religion or else didn’t answer the question. That’s quite a sizable minority.

SM: I was going to say, it is. A quarter of a million people in a population of 4.2 million or 4.3 million there or therabouts.

MN: Yes, technically, it’s the second largest grouping after Roman Catholics.

Atheists and Reason

SM: And when it comes to something like this, to give people a bit of background on atheism in general, its very much based on the idea of facts and evidence and reason, isn’t it?

MN: It is. Well, at it’s simplest, it’s either one or other of two things. It’s either saying that there’s no god, or else not saying that there is a god. And they’re both particularly unremarkable claims. You know, if I said that I don’t have five heads, it’s not a particularly remarkable thing to say. Equally, saying that there are no supernatural beings intervening in our lives and creating the universe, that isn’t particularly remarkable.

The default position is that rational thinking makes several things more likely. It makes enquiry more likely, in terms of trying to find out rationally what is true. It makes empathy more likely, in that people are going to treat each other as fellow human beings rather than being told what to do by deities, and it makes equality more likely, in that you’re going to have a secular society that’s based on respect for everybody rather than on rules that are handed down by a book that was written several thousand years ago.

SM: I don’t think anybody would disagree with any of that, but the idea of needing rational explanations for everything… you know, there’s a lot of things that go on in our lives. And we were talking before about the idea of love and marriage, which is probably one of the more irrational things that happen in our lives. Do we need a rational explanation for everything?

MN: It’s not so much that we need a rational explanation. It’s just that, whatever explanation that we come up with, we come up with by discussing it among ourselves. And we decide as natural beings, well, this is what love means to us, or this is what humour means to us… that’s all that it is, really. It’s not dictating what your ethics should be, or what love is. It’s just saying that it comes from within us, that it isn’t dictated to us by an imaginary being who wrote a book two thousand years ago.

The Atheist Bus Ads

SM: Right. And if we did see, let’s just say, the campaign that’s running now in the UK with ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ If those buses did start chugging down O’Connell Street, do you think that people would have a problem with the idea of it, or would have a problem with the wording of it?

MN: Well, I’ll put it to you this way. As you know, there is a complaint in England about it. If people did have a complaint about it on the basis that you can’t prove there is no god, they should equally have much more complaints with promotions of the idea that there is a god, because the evidence certainly, in all probability, is leaning towards there not being a god.

If you take for example, it’s not technically an ad, but last year there was an ad banned by the Advertising Standards Authurity for slimming pills. And it was banned on the basis that the company couldn’t substantiate its claim that it would soak up fat from your food, and so on. Now, the reason I remember that particularly is that, on the same day that ban was announced, the Pope was announcing an even more unsubstantiatable special offer, which was that if you visited Lourdes with a year, you would get time off from Purgatory, and you would get to Heaven earlier, when you die. Now, on any basis, those types of claims are far more unsubstantiatable than the unremarkable claim that the world is, broadly speaking, as it seems to be.

Atheists and Faith

SM: Right. And when it comes to atheism, and the idea of proving – and once again, we are back to our rationality once again – if in a hypothethical situation, someone was to come along and present evidence, that an atheist was to find convincing, of something, in this case, the existence of god… that’s a large part of atheism, that you’re willing to accept that evidence then.

MN: Sure. Exactly. And, you know, whatever is true is true. We don’t know what it is. We’re not claiming that we know certainly what it is. All that we’re saying is that, on the basis of the evidence we have so far, we’re living beings, that live in a natural world, that is part of a natural universe. And it is up to us to figure out the nature of the reality that we live in, and to figure out how best to live together, and how to treat each other, and how to be kind to each other, and to have a society built on those values.

SM: And when it comes to the idea, then, of faith, obviously people themselves have an idea, they have an notion in their head. And if they take comfort from the fact that they have faith or belief, they may not perhaps be able to rationally explain to you… is that something that is maybe missing from atheism? Or is it something of an alien concept to you, the idea that you have faith in something yet it doesn’t necessarily have a rational explanation.

MN: No. Well, you don’t necessarily have to be able to explain everything. You know, there’s nothing wrong with saying ‘I don’t know.’ I mean, we can’t know everything. There are things that, centuries ago, people didn’t know that we now know. And there are things that we don’t know now, that in a couple of centuries time, people will know. At any given time, there are things we don’t know. And some people, in any given generation, happen to call those things God, and say God did it.

Atheist Ireland

SM: Right. And you yourself, and some like-minded individuals, have now got involved in the Atheist Ireland project.

MN: Yes, it’s a group that we’ve started off with a meeting last month, and we’re going to be formally launching it soon. It arose out of a website called Atheist.ie, which is a discussion forum where people can discuss atheist related issues in Ireland. And we have now formally started an organisation called Atheist Ireland, and its aim… we have two aims. One is to promote atheism and reason over superstition and supernaturalism. And the second aim is to promote a rational, ethical and secular Ireland where the state does not support or fund or give special treatment to any religion.

And arising from that, the tpe of things we are going to be looking at initially are promoting a secular Irish Constitution… currently our Constitution starts off by saying that all authority comes from the Holy Trinity and that we humbly acknowledge our obligations to our Divine Lord Jesus Christ. I mean, it’s quite fine for people to do that, but it shouldn’t be in the Constitution.

And there are some extraordinary claims in the Constitution, such as ‘The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God’. That’s not actually a defence of the right of people to worship God. That’s a defence of the right of this God to be worshipped. We’re placing the rights of the Gods within our Constitution. And it may sound like it’s just picking holes, but there are cases where fundamental rights have been interpreted on the basis that we have a Christian Constitution, so they have to be interpreted that way.

So the Constitution is one thing, and the second main thing that we are looking at is the education system, and the need to have a secular education system where people can be taught rationally. And they can learn whatever religion that they want from their religions, but not from the education system.

Conclusion

SM: Very good. Well, if people want more details, they can go to the website, Atheist.ie.

MN: And they can get involved either in discussions, or indeed get involved in the preparations for the launch of the organisation, by going to Atheist.ie and just getting involved in the chat generally there.

SM: Michael, thanks very much for coming in and talking to us.

MN: Simon, you’re welcome.

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Cultural Map of the World

Religion and wealth are the two main factors that influence cultural values around the world. The influence of religion can be measured on a scale from traditional values to secular-rational values, and the influence of wealth can be measured on a scale from survival values to self-expression values.

Traditional values are highest in Africa and Latin America, and secular-rational values are highest in Japan and Protestant Europe. Survival values are highest in Africa and ex-communist countries, and self-expression values are highest in Protestant Europe and English-speaking countries.

That’s according to the World Values Surveys, which is the largest ever cross-national survey of social change. It was conducted from 1990 to 2005, in over eighty countries spanning all six inhabited continents, by a network of social scientists at leading universities around the world.

Cultural Values Map of the World

Based on these surveys, two political scientists (Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michegan and Christian Welzel of Jacobs University Bremen) have devised this Cultural Map of the World:

Religious societies typically emphasise parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values, as well as national pride. They reject divorce, abortion, euthenasia and suicide.

Wealthy societies allow young people to grow up taking survival for granted, and to focus on subjective wellbeing and quality of life, which in turn can have an influence on traditional values.

In most societies, although more slowly in Africa, cultural values have been shifting towards both secular-rational and self-expression since the first World Values Survey was conducted in 1990.

Human Constraints versus Human Choice

Here’s how Prof. Welzel analyses this trend. He says both dimensions actually measure human constraints versus human choices, on the community and personal levels. When a community has strong traditional values, it emphasises human constraints such as religion, patriotism, authority, obedience, and traditional family structures. When a person has strong self-expression values, she emphasises human choices such as freedom and self-direction, taking part in public expression, tolerating nonconformity, and trusting people.

Prof. Welzel says this shift in values is a central aspect of human development. More wealth enables younger people in particular to feel more independent in material means, intellectual skills and social connectivity. They then feel more safe and secure, and thus more able to escape from unchosen community ties. They also feel more self-directed, and thus more able to develop their creative human potentials. And all of this leads to what Prof Welzel calls postmaterialistic liberty aspirations, where people both value democracy more and are more critical of the actual performance of democracy.

Sources

• World Values Surveys
• Professor Ronald Inglehart
• Professor Christian Welzel

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