Round at Vukutu, Peter takes me (and Richard Norman) to task over the relationship between religious practice and religious belief. Peter's complaint is threefold. First, he rejects the idea - as expressed in this case by Richard Norman, but defended also by me - that practices like praying only make sense in the light of certain beliefs about what the practices are doing. Second, Peter says that I mock the motivations of the religious. Third, he asserts that 'intelligent people may act without first having a well-grounded belief to justify their actions'.
Peter's first point trades upon a subtle shift of reference and falls to a simple self-contradiction. Richard Norman had said that prayer depends on the belief that there is 'someone... being addressed' in the prayer. Peter replies: not necessarily. 'Only a literalist', he says, '... would imagine that the syntax of an utterance represents the full extent of its possible meanings or uses'. And he then continues:
Rather, most people who pray or chant or sing hymns or attend church do so in order to commune with what they consider to be (or might be) a non-material realm, the divine.
Now, (a) the argument here is about a wide social practice and not about this or that individual. There may well be, here and there, people praying with any number of different motivations - some, perhaps, only to be part of a ritual that unites them with others - but I agree with Richard Norman that the practice as a whole, for most of its practitioners, presupposes some belief that would make sense of that practice. (b) It may be the case that not everyone praying thinks about prayer as supplication, but Peter merely asserts that this isn't usually so; pending some evidence in support of his assertion, I will merely counter-assert that I think it very often is so. And (c) - decisively - even for those for whom prayer is not usually a form of supplication, the belief that it is a way of 'commun[ing] with what they consider to be (or might be) a non-material realm' is itself a belief of exactly the sort that I, and Richard Norman, and others sceptical about Karen Armstrong's claims regarding practice and belief assert to be involved: it is a belief about something independent of the believer and making sense of what the prayer is supposed to be for or about; it concerns something external to the believer - a 'realm' - about which people who have a questioning approach to life are entitled to ask, 'What is the evidence for this?'
As for my supposed mockery of the motivations of the religious, Peter tracks it to this post. Well, I won't deny a certain mischievous intent there, but the fact is the post's primary purpose was to put forward an argument. This argument, as anyone can check for herself, was that if a person's uncorroborated experience, a mere 'sighting', suffices to validate their having been in the presence of the divine, why would the same thing not also suffice in cases where... where we typically don't accept it as doing that? The fact that I expressed the thing in a lighthearted way, not in accents of unrelieved earnestness, is not something I'll be apologizing for. I do not mock or ridicule religious people, and I have spent time on this blog opposing that impulse and some of its contemporary themes - 'religion poisons everything' and all the rest of it. But, as an atheist, I'm entitled to argue my corner, and in the post in question I was responding to - precisely - an argument from the other, religious corner, put out in a national newspaper and hence in the great big public domain. Sauce for the goose, therefore, if I may say so.
Intelligent people, finally, do indeed sometimes act without first having a well-grounded belief to justify their actions. They do it all the time. Sometimes you may plan to do a particular thing after lunch, knowing all the good reasons why you made that plan, and then you just don't do it - without either rhyme or reason. You don't feel like it, is all. But, reminding us of this, Peter evades the specific point in contention by recourse to a generality. The question is not whether people sometimes act without a considered reason, but whether a specific, age-old human practice - namely, prayer - involves any beliefs about the nature and existence of entities external to the people doing the praying. That not all action is prompted by prior justifying beliefs no more establishes that prayer generally isn't than it establishes that the taking of aspirin generally isn't.
