https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bxNIEhxeBsk
I was reviewing your book today, Breaking the Spell, and that’s really the domain that I wanted to discuss, although I’m perfectly happy to branch out from that in anywhere that our conversation takes us. And I want to try out some ideas on you, and I want to see what you have to say about them. I’m going to start with a definition, if you don’t mind, from your book, so that we have some sense that we’re talking about the same thing. I think I’ll try two definitions, because there’s two domains I think that we could dig into that would be very useful. So, like you, I’m interested in what I believe I’m interested in, the scientific analysis of religious belief. I don’t think that we can… Well, I am too. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and so that’s where I’d like to investigate. So I’m going to start out with a couple of definitions from your books, and then we can dig into that. So the first one is that you described the religious domain as a vowed belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. And that was a definition that I took from Breaking the Spell. I’m wondering if… And then I’m going to add something to that, and then I’ll get you to comment about whether you think those definitions still suffice, or maybe how they’ve changed in your thinking, or anything you’d like to add to them. So the other thing that I’m curious about here is, you talked about aboutness, and you said the aboutness of a pencil, of the pencil marks. The aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopping list is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is. And I’m interested in that, the relationship between intentionality. And the reason I want to bring that into the discussion of religion is because I think there’s a link between the ideas that I’ve been developing and the ideas of intentionality that at least in part typify your thought. And I don’t see the relationship precisely between those ideas of intentionality and this definition of the religious enterprise that you described. And so that’s the first thing I’d like to get clarified. So my understanding of perception is that aim defines perception. And that seems to me to be akin to your… It’s akin in some ways to your conception of intentionality and aboutness. Does that seem at least vaguely plausible? Yes, more or less. When I speak about intentionality, I mean it in the philosopher’s sense derived from Rentano. It’s the aboutness is a good synonym for intentionality. And it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with one’s intentions. If I’m startled by a loud noise, my startle is about that loud noise, but there’s no intention involved in the sense of, what do you intend, sir? I may have some intentions immediately, like I am going to run or I’m going to duck, but intention in the legal sense of, did you do that on purpose, is a distinct notion. Okay, so maybe you can clarify what that means in relationship to aboutness then. That’s obviously, I’m not familiar with the distinction that you’re drawing, or sufficiently familiar. What’s the relationship between the concepts of intention and aboutness? Well, the Latin, intendere arcum in, is to point an arrow at. And Rentano and others said this is the key to thought. It’s directed at something. It has an intentional object. The intentional object is whatever the thought is about. And the curious thing about thoughts is that they can be about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. And in that case, they’re about something that doesn’t exist. But that creates logical problems. But we can set those logical problems aside and just deal with the fact that we have to explain how information that’s in our brains can be about things in the world, and also about things that don’t even exist. Okay, so that helps. And the Latin that you referred to is also very helpful. So I’m going to throw something in from left field, let’s say. So the word sin, there’s a three language point of derivation for the word sin. They’re all from archery. To sin means to miss the target. So Greek is hamartia. I don’t remember what the Hebrew is. Chet, I think, but I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. It means to miss the target. And it is an archery term. And so it’s, you could think of sin in that regard as malintention or missintention or merely failure to miss the target. And so there’s a, and then you talked about intentionality with regard to thought being directed at something. And so the way I’ve been conceptualizing the religious enterprise isn’t so much in relationship to the definition that you offered with regard to avowed belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought, although I’d like to get into that because it’s dead relevant. Let me run something by you. So when we aim our attention at something, we’re aiming our attention within a hierarchy of aim. And the religious enterprise looks to me to be the enterprise that specifies the highest aim or the most foundational of aims. And I think that our instinct that there’s such a thing as depth, say depth in literary analysis, for example, or depth of significance in relationship to concepts, is a function of the fact that there’s a hierarchy of intention. And I think that as you move toward the foundation or up to the apex, depending on which metaphor frame you use, you start to enter into the realm of what’s deep and that the realm of what’s deep is what signifies the religious. I mean, this is like a technical definition. And so imagine that any given intention depends on another intention and that depends on another intention. But as you stack the intentions up and analyze them, you go down into the depths to see what the foundational intentions are. The religious is the realm of the foundations of intention. There’s a good way of thinking about it. So that’s a different definition, obviously, than the supernatural agent definition. And so I’m wondering, what’s the definition of the supernatural agent? And so I’m wondering, well, first of all, if that explanation makes any sense to you, because it’s pretty brief, and also what your reactions to that are. Well, my reaction to it is that the term that I would use for what you’re talking about is the summum bonum, the highest good. And that is not necessarily a religious idea. I have my sense of what’s the most important thing, what are the most important things, and I’m not religious. But I’d like to say deep, I share the hierarchy of ends that you describe. I don’t think of my endorsement and allegiance to that ethic as a religious ethic. But there it is, and I am happy to say there are some things that are more important than others. Okay, okay. Well, that’s actually why I wanted to start with definition, right? Because there’s no sense having a discussion about what something means unless we can agree what territory we’re wandering over. Okay, so now we seem to have established, okay, so we seem to have established some agreement that there’s a hierarchy of conceptualization, or you said even more specifically, a hierarchy of good. And you referred to the summum bonum. And you said you have a hierarchy of good, and you believe that there’s something, hypothetically, something at the apex or at the foundation. So, okay, so maybe, okay, so let’s see, let’s, it’s definitely the case that there are medieval conceptions of the Judeo-Christian God as the summum bonum. And there are insistences in the biblical corpus that in the final analysis, God is ineffable, even though he’s conceptualized in those stories as a spirit with whom communication is possible. But his fundamental nature disappears into the ineffable. That’s what the theologians claim when they’re pushed. And so, okay, so let’s see if we can figure that out. So, I don’t think that the conception of God as the sum of all that’s good is an accurate conceptualization. It seems to me it’s more like whatever God is conceptualized to be is that which all good things share in common. Right? I know that that’s, that makes the concept of God something like the central element in a web of ideas that surround the concept of the good as such. Right, right. It’s not exactly a sum. And it’s important to be precise when discussing things like this. Now, you said you have a conception of the highest good. And so, can I ask you what that is? Well, it’s not readily definable. But there’s, I think that human beings are the measure of what’s good. And over the eons, we have gradually discovered and invented and contrived standards of what we think good is. And that’s as much for, you know, a good wheel or a good axe or a good airplane or a good person. And these, all sorts of different, you know, there’s even, I suppose, good machine guns, good at being a machine gun. But the moral good is a particular human realm. I think animals don’t really have morality. They have something that makes morality possible, but they don’t have morality. But we human beings have evolved systems of morality. And they implicitly fix. They don’t define in the geometrical sense what the highest good is, but they outline it. They point to it. And it’s a moving target. What we think of as good today is quite different from what was thought good back in Old Testament days. Nobody today would want to live with Old Testament morality. We’ve come a long way from that. Thank goodness.