There’s a fine old country gospel song, “Farther Along,” I can recommend to any of you who are fans of hillbilly music. It’s been recorded by a number of people, including Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt on their Trio album. Look it up sometime.
The song has a question and answer structure. A typical verse runs:
When death has come and taken our loved ones,
Leaving our homes so lone and so drear;
Then do we wonder why others prosper,
Living as sinners year after year.
The answer is, of course, that “farther along” we’ll understand why the world works in this apparently unjust way.
This is just one expression of a question central to all religions. If the universe or its God is just, why do bad things happen to good people? And why, on the other hand, do good things happen to bad people? The answer is, of course, that the injustice is only apparent, because it will be rectified in another life. You may suffer in this world, but you will be rewarded in Heaven. The bad man may seem to prosper now, but he will end up in Hell, suffering the pangs of eternal damnation. (Or, in the Hindu framework of reincarnation, the good man will come back in a better situation in his next life, while the bad man will come back as a cockroach.)
We see this theme in Plato’s Republic, which may contain the first really clear expression of the afterworld as an instrument of justice. (Compare The Odyssey, in which the spirits of the dead wander aimlessly in the underworld, their past lives having no apparent influence upon their present circumstances. I might note that, as far as I can tell from limited reading, the Jewish concept of Sheol is closer to the underworld of Odyssey than to Christian images of the afterworld.) We see it in a very strong form in Christianity in the expression: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:31)
The concept of a retributive afterlife seems to arise from the need to reconcile evident present injustice with a basic intuition that life should be fair. There is, in fact, no evidence whatever that the books are, in fact, balanced on “the other side of the river.” But this belief appears to help people to tolerate their otherwise intolerable lives. Some people think that this is one of the most pernicious aspects of religion, in that it leads people to tolerate misery and oppression, instead of rising up to seize a better life. There’s a folk song on that theme too, “The Preacher and the Slave,” by Joe Hill, the chorus of which is:
You will eat, by and by,
In that glorious land above the sky,
(Way up high),
Work and pray,
Live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die,
(That’s a lie!)
Joe Hill may have been a little harsh; as a Marxist, he presumably thought of religion as the opiate of the people. Since it is quite evident that life isn’t fair, and since no religious organization I know of can guarantee to make life fair in this world, they are forced into promising justice in the world to come. So the churches won’t be held accountable now for the failings of society, but everyone will be held accountable in the world to come.
Take what comfort you can from that idea. Personally, I’ll just go with “Life isn’t fair.”
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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9 comments:
Before I posted the essay "Justice and Religion" to the blog, I sent it to a couple of friends for comment. Both noticed that my essay assumes that nothing is the default state. That is, I assume that there is no afterlife, unless or until someone comes up with evidence of the same. One of my friends thinks this is perfectly reasonable, while the other sees it as a "bias."
There have been claims for many, many years, and in several civilizations that there is some kind of afterlife. In my essay, I mention Homer's Odyssey, which dates back a good long ways. If these claims are taken as establishing a consensus, and if consensus is taken as evidence, then the claim that there is an afterlife would be the default position. In that case, the burden of proof would be on those who wish to dispute the notion of an afterlife, rather than on those who support that notion.
Unfortunately, or otherwise, belief is not evidence. Homer's description of the underworld in the Odyssey, various references in the New Testament, and even Dante's marvelous poem, are all products of the imagination. None of these works is evidence of the existence of an afterlife.
By definition, the only way you can get to see the afterlife and know what it's like, is by dying. It seems to be difficult to get around the obvious point that dead people don't make good witnesses.
Discussion is, as always, welcomed.
Let's pretend you've never seen Mount Kilimanjaro, I know you travel quite a bit so you may have, but let's say you haven't. How many people have to see it across how many years before the consensus of it's existence becomes a default? Or does it not exist until you personally have seen it?
I find the evolution of atheism and agnosticism interesting. I doubt that there was ever a time when everyone believed in God. That said, I find it interesting that atheists and agnostics have moved towards this idea that religion and belief are crutches used by weak people without the fortitude to face the realities of the world. Instantly they discount billions of lives lead and lessons learned from brilliant and average men alike, and set themselves up as more enlightened then all of them. Perhaps this would qualify as hubris?
The trouble with the after life is that no one has a scientifically falsifiable test for the existence of an afterlife short of death. In fact the entire problem with religion is that most of it can not be verified with scientific methods (the new religion of mankind). Attempting to address most religious questions with the scientific method is akin to trying to use a hammer to put a screw in to a board. Sure you can bang away at the problem, but you're using the wrong tools to get the job done.
Religion is about subjective experience. Exempting Quantum Mechanics, science is largely about assuming you are not part of the experiment. That you are somehow an objective outside observer with no effect on the outcome of the experiment. In all religious experiments you are an integral part of the experiment, and therefore it is impossible to create exactly identical situations to replicate the experiment person to person.
I'm not sure what your opinion is on free will (I'm a big fan), but an interesting topic along similar lines to this would be free will and eternal justice. If we have free will how would God be able to insure justice here in our earthly existence without destroying or severely limiting that free will? served on a slightly longer time
Doug has taken my comments well beyond where I intended them to go. My remarks were plainly limited, and intentionally so, to the role of the afterlife in notions of justice. That is, that the afterlife is a useful means of reconciling people to the obvious injustices of daily life, through the provision of hope of both compensation and reckoning after death. Read Dante to see how infused with the idea of justice are his efforts to show punishments ideally fitted to the crimes of their subjects.
The Kilimanjaro example takes me in a different direction, and one which I am going to take up in another essay very soon. If someone goes to Kilimanjaro - and I know at least one person who has climbed it, and he or she comes back with an account of the climb, photos of the mountain, photos taken from the mountain, souvenirs and so on, all this is evidence of what they've seen and done. I don't need to see Kilimanjaro with my own eyes to believe that it's there, in Kenya, and that other people have been there.
On my recent trip to the state of Washington, I saw Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Baker, as well as other natural features. If I tell you that Mt. St. Helens was there, that constitutes evidence that it was, in fact, there.
There are a lot of technical issues about evidence, consensus, shared experience, and so on. The whole subject of epistemology can be quite complex and challenging. But, for me, the bottom line is that I'm happy to accept that Mt. Kilimanjaro exists, as it is generally described, because there is an enormous amount of evidence that it does. But no one has come back after his death with first-hand accounts, photographs, maps, and souvenirs. Moreover, such practices as seances, efforts to obtain information from the afterlife, have long since been debunked.
There is not only no evidence of the afterlife, there is negative evidence as to its existence.
Glenn:
In your last comment you wrote: "There is not only no evidence of the afterlife, there is negative evidence as to its existence."
What "negative evidence"?
Thanks.
Rgds,
Zabeli
Agim,
I'm not sure what happened here. I thought I had posted a response to your question yesterday, but it isn't here. Oh, well.
I had in mind spiritualism. After the Civil War, and until sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, spiritualism was a big deal. Madame Blavatsky and many others wrote books on the subject, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a devotee, Mary Todd Lincoln supposedly attended seances, and ouija boards sold by the thousands.
One hypothesis is that the very high casualties of the American Civil War, and then of the First World War, led to a focus on the spiritual. On the one hand, there was a lot of religious writing and activity, and church attendance went up. On the other, there were seances, spirit photography, and lots of attempts to contact the departed.
(In today's Gazette, there was a story about people trying to photograph ghosts. That's just silly, but it comes from the same tradition.)
So, for a long period of time, a large number of people spent a lot of money and effort trying to contact the spirits of the dead - to prove, in effect, that there was an afterlife. And, over time, all of these efforts were debunked. Some of the mediums and their promoters were sincere, if misguided, others were out-and-out charlatans. None of the claims that contact had been made, that there was an afterlife with which we could communicate were substantiated.
I think that's negative evidence, if not of any afterlife, at least of some kinds of imaginable afterlife.
Glenn,
The debunking of communication between the living and deceased merely demonstrates that the living and dead can not communicate. It does not demonstrate conclusively that there is no afterlife. I think you're leaping a little in your conclusion.
I have a theory about proving the existence of God or an afterlife. Simply put my hypothesis is this; it is impossible to disprove the existence of God / an afterlife and similarly it is impossible to prove the existence of either short of death. (A conveniently one way experiment).
I believe it is impossible to prove the existence of God because if we could prove His existence there would be no need for faith. I believe it is impossible to disprove His existence because I believe He in fact exists.
What this means is that my hypothesis is potentially falsifiable but impossible to prove. (At least from my perspective.)
P.S. Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to your blog, I know conversations are tough to keep going if they extend out over months.
Let's clarify the language here, Doug. You're saying that it is impossible to prove the existence of God because such a proof would render faith unnecessary. I have heard variations on this theme, before, though not stated quite this way.
Let me see:
Premise: Faith is necessary.
Premise: A proof of the existence of God would render faith unnecessary.
Conclusion: Therefore, there is no proof of the existence of God.
This could restated as:
If faith is necessary, then there is no proof of the existence of God.
Which, in turn, can be recast as:
Either faith is necessary, or there is a proof of the existence of God.
That's all very well, Doug, but what reason do we have for believing that faith is necessary? And in what sense do you mean that it is needed?
Generally, necessity is attributed to objects for two reasons: 1) That it is entailed by a line of reasoning (formal or logical necessity), or 2) That it is required in order to satisfy some want (physical or contingent necessity).
If you are claiming necessity (1) for faith, then you need to show us your reasoning. If, on the other hand, you are claiming that one needs faith in order to do something else, or to satisfy a lack, what is it needed for?
Glenn,
I doubt that my reasoning will be sufficient. Faith is necessary for salvation according to the Bible. I believe there are limitations to how far logic and science can carry us, death is one of those limitations. Ultimately we will know one day whether God exists, existence ends with death, or if something else happens after death. Unfortunately we will not know this answer until we ourselves die.
You did not address my question though, does proving that the dead and the living can't speak also prove that there is nothing after death?
If you read my posts of July 23 and July 27, 2008, with some care, Doug, you'll find that I don't claim that I have proven that there is no afterlife. I merely point out that a) there is no evidence for the existence of an afterlife, and b) there is negative evidence regarding such a phenomenon, at least in some terms.
The spiritualism craze, which went on for many years and had many disciples, including a Prime Minister of Canada, involved a great many attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead. These attempts were unsuccessful, and such practices and "table rapping" and the use of Ouija boards has been demonstrated not to represent genuine communcation with the afterlife.
To put this in formal logical terms, I'm saying that there was an hypothesis that, if there is an afterlife, then we can communicate it. If I take that at face value, the nonexistence of communication entails the nonexistence of the afterlife.
This is the famous Modem Tollens:
If p, then q.
Not q.
Therefore, not p.
However, I am content to leave it that the overall "If ... then ... " statement was false. In other words, the proposition that there was an afterlife with which we could communicate has been disproven.
As to the overall proposition, I was quite clear in my comment of July 21, 2008, that I assume that there is no afterlife. That assumption holds, as far as I am concerned, "unless or until someone comes up with evidence of [and afterlife]." I am placing the burden of proof solidly upon those who assert that an afterlife does, in fact, exist.
That does not mean that I intend to change your belief in the afterlife, Doug. Believe all you like, but your belief, however sincere, is not evidence that what you believe exists. If you have evidence of the existence of the afterlife, I'd be happy to hear about it.
I might note that I think I could make a pretty good argument against the afterlife on other grounds, as well, if I needed to do so. As I recall, some of our discussions of the soul on the old Cafe got into whether the "soul" (anima, psyche) could survive the death of the body, and I found support for my opinion that it could not.
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