The Phoniness of Religious Beliefs and Practices
Shibboleths, social sacrifices, and apologetical double agents
The old debate between monotheists and atheists that stretches back in the West at least to the philosophical and political impacts of the Scientific Revolution, known collectively as the Enlightenment, may easily appear to be a waste of time and intellectual resources.
How many zealots have argued about God’s existence or the merits of Christianity or Islam, and how many minds have thereby been changed? Both camps go on as before, like ships passing in the night.
Perhaps these debates are pointless because they’re irrelevant: not only are monotheistic religions seemingly based on faith, fear, and a longing to fit into a social group, but secular worldviews have their nonrational side too. I doubt any socially well-adjusted person’s beliefs are epistemically flawless; no one’s mind is entirely logical, boosted by mental models that are empirically well-supported at every level. The human brain isn’t just a computer in the technological sense since the brain is tied to our emotions and instincts. Indeed, we seldom think in strictly logical terms, just as we’re not often actively self-aware.
Nevertheless, the ideologies that inspire the most proselytizing, including Christianity, Islam, and the fad of New Atheism have developed elaborate philosophical justifications so that any monotheist or atheist who wishes for a rational self-defense has more than enough material upon which to build.
In the case of the monotheistic religions, though, these self-defenses seem like smokescreens for another reason. It’s not just that the theologies in question act as psychological primers for accepting earthly oligarchy and economic injustice. It’s also that the palpable absurdity of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic creeds and of their theological elaborations indicates that these religious propositions aren’t likely ever even believed.
To be sure, Christians, for example, will make a show of swearing fealty to “Christ their Lord.” And monotheists generally pray to God to save or protect them, so it looks like these theists believe that their theologies are true and that their religious institutions are indispensable.
But our ability to deceive ourselves is as dynamic as our capacity for self-awareness. Just as we can excel at observing the nuances of our thoughts and attitudes, we can systematically avoid certain truths and overlook the essence of what we’re doing. Indeed, mundane self-deception is much more common than saintly or enlightened self-awareness.
Thus, just because someone claims to believe this or that, doesn’t mean it’s so. That’s not to say the person is necessarily lying to herself or to others because there are numerous forms and shades of self-deception. The problem, rather, could be a misunderstanding, albeit likely a motivated one.
Entertaining fictions and preposterous myths
The question we should ask, then, is about the real function of so-called religious beliefs. What are these beliefs?
By way of analogy, note the difference between the beliefs that the sky is blue and that Superman can fly. We call them both “beliefs,” but are nonfictional and fictional mental representations really the same? Do they fulfill the same mental and social functions?
Of course, the belief about the fictional character Superman is meant to entertain. We don’t believe there’s really a person who can fly (without an airplane or comparable piece of technology); rather, we suspend our disbelief, using our imagination to ponder a fictional world. The fun is in pretending that a made-up world is real. In short, we use our mind to play or to learn, rather like children.
I don’t suppose religious folks are just playing when they claim to have this or that theological conviction. But what fiction shows is that there are odd sorts of beliefs too.
I suspect that a clue to the function of religious “beliefs” is the egregious counter-factuality of their contents. Sure, the notion that Superman can fly is also absurd, but at least authors of fictions take the trouble to lend verisimilitude to their stories. For example, Superman turns out to be an extraterrestrial who absorbs the Sun’s energies to give him superpowers. So, this story is a work of science fiction since it gestures towards an explanation of how the superpowers work.
By contrast, religious myths are deliberately free of such signs of plausibility. On the contrary, the stories that make up these creeds, theologies, and theodicies are full of miracle claims. Perhaps originally a miracle was just a natural wonder rather than explicitly a supernatural event since “nature” acquired a more technical meaning only with the rise of philosophy and science. In the ancient world, anything sublime that wasn’t fully understood, such as rainfall, disease, or a mountain range might have seemed a “miraculous” result of God’s superpowers.
But eventually, a miracle came to be associated with a metaphysical violation of natural law. The attempt to lend credibility to a miracle story with some causal explanation would have been blasphemous since it would have amounted to a naturalization of God, to a reduction of the transcendent source of all reality to the inferior standards of that source’s creation. Whereas self-conscious authors of fiction try to make their stories realistic or at least plausible, to enable the reader to suspend her disbelief (her knowledge that, strictly speaking, the story is a lie), a mythmaker has no such obligation.
As a result, religious stories are supremely implausible. That’s how you know you’re reading a myth rather than a work of entertaining fiction. The myth just takes certain nonsense for granted, like a surreal film by David Lynch, and the question before us is why. If religious folks aren’t intentionally suspending their disbelief in claiming to believe these religious stories about God, angels, demons, miracles, and prophets, what’s the real function of these pseudobeliefs?
Shibboleths and the handicap principle
One possibility is that religious pseudobeliefs are shibboleths. Judges 12:4–6 tells of how the men of Gilead fought the Ephraimites by determining whether everyone who crossed the Jordan River could say the word “shibboleth,” because the Ephraimites pronounced it improperly, saying “sibboleth.” Whoever failed the linguistic test, “they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.”
A shibboleth, then, is “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.” Yet linguistic tests of social identity are risky because foreigners can learn to correct their pronunciation. The ideal shibboleth would be a test that only the right social group could pass.
Here the evolutionary handicap principle helps us understand how animals use elaborate social cues to tell each other apart and to indicate their merits. Male peacocks signal their genetic fitness by proving that they can flourish even with such extravagant tail feathers. Males of many species undergo elaborate mating procedures, sacrificing their dignity and endangering themselves by performing dances and other rituals to charm the female.
Maybe religious beliefs are the human equivalents of such animal extravagance. Maybe the point of religious beliefs isn’t to be rational or to be in touch with reality, nor is it to play for entertainment’s sake. Rather, the purpose might be to signal a certain group identity or social status by using a self-sacrificial cue.
Compare this to the price of joining a criminal gang, which is often the committing of an overt, brutal crime, amounting to a trial by fire. Likewise, the Hollywood stereotype of a corrupt police force is that the established police will support a new officer only if they “get some dirt” on him or her. The newbie must likewise step outside the confines of the law to prevent him or her from being able to blackmail the corrupt department.
And see how readily this explanation accounts for the weirdness of religious content. The more preposterous the religious conviction, the more embarrassing such rituals and oaths are to an average outsider, the more pertinent that information is to the passing of that social test. If just anyone could join a religion without having to prove his or her loyalty, the religion would lose its favour because the organization would be vulnerable to parasitic members. A religion might flourish with hundreds of millions of followers, but only if those members pay some dues. Only a religion that’s a flourishing business or Ponzi scheme and that can support its members here and now — even if only psychologically — could keep attracting members.
Nothing is gained without paying the price, and the cost of membership especially in the proselyting monotheistic faiths — namely Christianity and Islam — is the humiliation of the religious person’s intellect and the divorcing of that person from secular progress. The latter is done by imposing the very act of confessing faith in some flagrant absurdity or the performance of a magical ritual that would seem foolish in any mundane secular context.
The incentive here is clear:
the more absurd the pseudobelief or ritual, the more suitable this behaviour is for shibbolethian purposes because the absurdity demands a greater self-sacrifice and thus amounts to a clearer social indicator of the person’s commitment to the religious group.
The apologetics of double agents
This explanation raises two further questions. The first is why many monotheists should be so coy with their shibboleths and pretend that their religious behaviour is rationally justified. Again, shouldn’t that double-cross count as blasphemy, according to the religious standards? If the point is to prove your loyalty to a group by showing your willingness to degrade yourself, to pass the test of affiliation, the religious person could only be weakening the shibboleth by attempting to philosophically justify the myths and rituals.
Take, for example, the Christian apologist William Lane Craig’s empty tomb argument which is meant to prove that Christian faith in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is rational. More specifically, this faith is supposed to be respectable according to an historian’s standards for dealing with empirical evidence. Of course, Craig’s argument isn’t nearly as strong as he suggests.
But the mystery is why Christians even pretend that reason is on their side when the whole point of their religion is that God transcends both nature and our human cognitive capacities. Any deity we could understand and envision would be an idol, a false god. Why, then, would the religious person engage in this rationalist pretense?
Partly, the explanation is that this kind of apologetics arose as a defense against modernization. For God to be in absolute control, no tool could escape God’s mastery. Our capacity to reason our way out of accepting religions had to be accounted for in monotheistic terms. The religious person could attribute secularism to the work of demons, but that only pushed the problem back to the need to account for the existence of demons in a universe supposedly run by an all-powerful, benevolent God.
In any case, just as conservative religions often lose their integrity when the practitioners get caught up in politics, religions are effectively secularized by the practitioner’s resort to scientific and philosophical standards of justification. Again, the theological content of such a justified belief could only be idolatrous. Indeed, the talk of religious “beliefs” in the first place should be blasphemous because belief formation is a psychological mechanism based on experience, social interaction, thought processes, and so on. A mere effect of such processes could hardly testify to a divinity that’s supposed to transcend all of nature.
We can imagine, though, that Christians especially were torn between the benefits of opposing group memberships, since their religion passed directly through modernizing Europe. They could belong to their traditional religion, or they could side with the progress of science, capitalism, democracy, technological advances, modern art, and so on.
One strategy would be to attempt to have it both ways, like a double-dealing spy who must defect to join forces with the sworn enemy but who can make that defection ambiguous rather than burning bridges to the first tribe. This seems like the tactic of the Christian apologist who either liberalizes the doctrine of everlasting punishment of nonbelievers in Hell, for example, or who resorts to pseudophilosophical arguments to defend this archaic and appalling doctrine. She makes it seem as though she’s allied herself with secular standards of knowledge, either by obfuscating the preposterous contents of her theological worldview or by maintaining that even religious fundamentalism isn’t an affront to modern reason.
But far from siding entirely with secularism, this double agent retains her religious membership with subtle cues that she arbitrarily limits her application of the secular standards. She doesn’t apply scientific, philosophical, or historical reasoning consistently, but only in token or peripheral cases, sparing the core of her religious commitment from being downgraded.
In his philosophical debates, for instance, William Lane Craig often uses pseudoscientific rhetoric to attempt to prove that God exists, even while he supports his arguments with appeals to intuition that favour his anthropocentric religion, and he tends to close his presentations with a naked appeal to the Christian creed and to his “personal experience of the risen Christ.”
With his academic training, Craig has learned to speak both the archaic and the modern languages. He resorts to the shibboleths of both Gilead and of the Ephraimites, as it were. This “rational” or “evidential Christian” is a double agent who blends into modern society, into the academy and the businesses of selling books and speaking on a lecture circuit, while also fitting smoothly into the Christian tribe which is quite deliberately alien to modernity. This double agent defends rank absurdity with explicit appeals to secular philosophy and science and uses sophistry and casuistry to conceal the inconsistencies, lacunas, and hypocrisy.
The trick of uncovering these double agents is to watch out for the use of both sets of shibboleths or dog whistles.
Secular shibboleths
But this raises the second question, which is whether the borders of secular societies likewise are guarded by shibboleths. Must participants in a capitalist economy, democratic voting process, secular pop culture, scientific institution, or philosophical discourse degrade herself to signal her fealty and to obtain the benefits of belonging to these institutions?
If so, some or all of these secular groups would have to be absurd on some level of analysis. Otherwise, some such groups might freely dispense their benefits without asking for much in return, which might make the enterprise unfeasible.
Late-industrial capitalism has at least two apparently absurd expectations, these being the legal protection for private property and the use of inherently worthless money in its transactions. The philosopher John Locke defended the doctrine of private property by saying that we naturally own whatever we “mix our labour” with, so that if you put some natural resource to use, you own the result of that labour. But from nature’s point of view, as it were, this notion of ownership is just a legal fiction.
Likewise, even when money is backed by gold rather than being a fiat currency or a shifting set of numbers in a computer, nothing in nature is inherently valuable. Thus, capitalism entails that we ought to value gold, certain pieces of paper, or numbers on a computer screen. Again, from a purely objective standpoint, that behaviour could look foolish.
Likewise, if it turned out in the American two-party political system that both parties are effectively corporatist and bought off by unelected leaders of the ruling neoliberal ideology, voting for either party might seem futile, rather like “believing” that a miracle happened two thousand years ago even when ordinary experience and the standards of modern society strip that miracle claim of any credibility. Even in democracies that have many viable parties, voting could seem counterproductive because the work of one party will be countermanded when a rival party or coalition takes power. Believing that a democracy could progress in the long term might depend, then, on little more than a leap of faith.
As for popular culture, as I said, we routinely suspend our disbelief for the sake of playing and entertaining ourselves. But the prospect of adults behaving like children could easily seem undignified from an austere perspective.
Arguably, science and philosophy are each doubly absurd. First, they take for granted the universe’s naturalness and its amenability to our standards of reason. Of course, scientists needn’t say the laws of nature are eternal and necessary, but can treat them as probable, based on the results of our common experience. But as David Hume showed with the problem of induction, this wouldn’t be a strictly rational generalization. He called this form of intuitive reasoning a “habit” or a “custom,” but it’s more like a hubristic act of faith in ourselves since we don’t experience the world directly, but only through our modes of perception and understanding (as Immanuel Kant explained).
Second, both assume that the results of these rational inquiries will benefit us in the long run, which is dubious. For instance, the ancient Greeks thought that naturalistic knowledge isn’t just conducive to happiness but that the two are necessarily connected. Those who have the wisdom to understand the world and thus to get what they want are happy. But the Greek philosophers’ understanding of nature was superficial. Specifically, they neglected to follow to its bitter end the distinction between the wilderness and civilization; instead, they presumed that natural processes have purposes just like our artifacts do. The further out we peer into nature, though, the more arbitrary our intuitions and the more myopic our pastimes seem, which threatens us with despair and existential vertigo.
I won’t make the case here at greater length, but it seems at least plausible that secular societies are guarded by shibboleths as well, in which case our fundamental secular convictions might be pseudobeliefs, too, as hard as it may be for secularists to concede that commonality with the archaic religions. After all, only a fish out of water knows it’s been swimming all along in that medium.
But suppose, on the contrary, that secular institutions aren’t preposterous enough to have shibboleths that compare with those of monotheistic religions. Suppose these institutions dispense with their benefits relatively freely since they’re based on a humanistic philosophy that accords rights to everyone equally just in virtue of our common personhood.
In that case, there would be another downside of secularism, which is that this kind of culture wouldn’t make for a tightly bonded society. We’d have material benefits galore, but little emotional comfort from belonging to our modern nation or social stratum. We’d have no myths to test our faith or to encourage us to trust in anything with such wild abandon. We’d be deprived of the happiness that depends on delusions. We might mimic our machines in striving to be efficient in every area of life, but we’d lose our conviction that life is precious and worthwhile.
This brings to mind the well-known modern sense of jadedness, apathy, or ennui, coupled with the “postmodern” nihilism and relativism that trivialize all group convictions. One of the selling points of religion is that it saves the member from the burdens of full-blown rational enlightenment. The price of that salvation, though, is a wallowing in the indignity of some self-imposed handicap.