Tom, at Freemania, misunderstands a sentence of mine in the argument about religion, and I'd like to correct the misunderstanding. The sentence is this one:
The argument that they [religious people] could have done such things [brave and good things] without the religion may be true but it isn't relevant: if we are estimating what the effects of religion have been, then its beneficial effects are what they are even if they could have been obtained otherwise.And Tom writes about it as follows:
This seems to miss the point about cause and effect: if a religious individual's act of heroism or lifetime of charitable effort would have happened even in the absence of their religion, then it isn't a consequence of that religion. If Y would have occurred regardless of whether X had, then X didn't cause Y.I take my share of responsibility for the misunderstanding here, because what Tom says shows that the sentence is open to being read with another meaning than the one I intended, and I didn't foresee this. For he interprets me as meaning that, had they not been religious, these individuals would have done what they did in the way of good or heroic acts even so - perhaps just because of humane virtues that were independently part of their make-up. But my own meaning was that in an alternative world, such people might behave, or have behaved, just as they did, because in that alternative world their moral beliefs could have been formed by a non-religious, say humanist, ethic encouraging the same sort of acts.
My view is the one explained at the end of this post: I take the religious motivation to be a real cause, unless and until someone comes up with a powerful reason or piece of evidence to the contrary. But this is not to say that the same function as the ethical teachings of religion can't be fulfilled by a secular morality. I believe it can be - and that is the point of my sentence which Tom misconstrues.
To give a crude analogy: if my back lawn is wet because we have had rain in Manchester, then it is the rain that is the cause of the grass being wet; but if it doesn't rain I can water the grass with my trusty watering can instead (not that I'd ever bother, as a matter of fact). I don't think a world without religion - if a world without religion is indeed possible or likely, as I have my doubts - would be deprived of all moral bearings, as some religious believers argue. All the same, I think the evidence for religion having beneficial as well as bad effects is overwhelming, and gainsaid only by people who lose their intellectual balance when thinking about religion, because of their hostility to it.
On this see also Peter's splendid post on language, religion and politics. He writes:
Those who are driven by religion to virtuous and courageous acts may really be acting on a universal and fundamentally secular moral conscience, but their rationale is religious and religion may have been a key factor in transforming them from passive dissidents into active resistors.I think calling their moral conscience 'fundamentally secular' begs the question, but Peter nonetheless allows a beneficial causality to religious belief in a post arguing that religion isn't the 'sole possible vehicle for morality', which it plainly isn't. Money quote from his post:
Compare the lyricism of Blake with the barbarities of post-modernism and see where each will lead you.