BothAndBlog Forum

Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/502514

The working definition of religion which I will offer is one offered by William James in, 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' :
'Were one asked to characterise the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.' — Jack Cummins

That's a pretty good non-sectarian definition of Religion. So, in that case, Albert Einstein was a religious person. But I would distinguish between a personal unofficial Philosophy and a communal doctrinal Religion.

I call my "belief in an unseen order" in Nature, and my attempt to "harmoniously adjust thereto", merely a personal philosophical worldview. However, most people are not so rationally or philosophically inclined; hence their "need" for a religious community of faith & feeling, may result from the cognitive dissonance between their intuition of "Order" in the world, despite the obvious Disorders of life, and their uncertainty about the ambivalent "Unseen" organizer. Having a scriptural authority for your belief, releases you from responsibility for personally resolving the "need" for assurance that someone is in control, and that things are going to be alright.

Those who are philosophically opposed to any form of Supernaturalism or Religion though, may either deny the inherent order of Nature (emphasizing randomness instead), or place their trust in Science (to reveal the self-ordering powers of evolution).

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
____Albert Einstein

"there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought."
___Albert Einstein, Religion and Science

"We're hand-wired to avoid uncertainty, because it makes us feel lots of negative emotions,"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/17/coronav ... -next.html

Spinoza didn't believe in free will. When I was reading his Ethics at first I thought he was a compatibilist until he directly denied that any free will was real. I would guess Einstein was of the same frame of mind. This is indicated by his desire to fully understand God by finding a scientific "theory of everything". I see this as just Gnosticism — Gregory

Spinoza's expressed position on freewill was based on his understanding of Cause & Effect Determinism, for which he saw no gaps. (But he may not have been familiar with Pascal's statistical & probabilistic definition of Chance) Anyway, in lieu of religious consolation, perhaps he found contentment in philosophical freedom of imagination. However, in my Enformationism thesis, the inherent randomness of natural events allows a small degree of freedom for the human Will to act as a Cause. I have several blog posts to explain how I arrived at that conclusion.

Let me know, if you are interested in my variant of Compatibilism : Conditional or Contingent Freedom Of Will (via Veto). Only the Creator or Cause of the world system would have Absolute freedom to deviate from the inevitable chain of cause & effect. But, any broken links in the chain would seem to be a self-contradiction of He/r expressed Will in the program for evolution. Unless, of course, the Programmer intended for some creatures to have the power to make moral choices : by taking advantage of random deviations from determinism.

Einstein, likewise, saw no loopholes for exceptions to inevitable Causation. But he also didn't seem to believe in classical Fatalism. Perhaps the mere illusion of freedom was enough to give him some comfort in his prison cell. FWIW, Albert called himself an "Agnostic".

He was also an incompatibilist; in 1932 he said: I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious ... t_Einstein

Conscious-will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious-will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.The existence of a veto possibility is not in doubt.
___Benjamin Libet, the 'freewill' experiment
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... ill%3F.pdf

Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?

Maybe this observation belongs on a more Spinoza specific thread but the determinism relates to how something is either caused by itself or by something not itself. That is quite different from viewing the matter as whether one can insert a cause between other causes. The point of "God" not being able to do it is pointing to a structural problem with the question more than offering an opinion about what is possible. — Valentinus

Yes. That's two different ways of looking at Causation and Determinism. Animals are differentiated from inanimate objects by their ability to cause themselves to move. But that's not much of a philosophical issue. The debatable question is whether the animal can make moral choices. For example, most animals seem to follow the First Commandment of "thou shalt not kill thine own kind". Predators sometimes fight amongst themselves, but seldom actually kill their rivals. But is that moral restraint built into their genes, or is it a situational choice? We can only guess about their motives. But humans can tell us why they did what they did. And they can lie about it. Yet few of us would admit to ourselves that "the devil made me do it". We tend to accept responsibility for our positive actions, and deny being self-caused in the case of negative or immoral acts.

However, a God is assumed to be able to do anything that is logically possible. So, the creator of this world might be faced with a choice : a> build a mechanical world that always does exactly what it is programmed to do (efficient, but boring!), or b> create a smoothly-running world that evolves into an uncertain & interesting future. Option <b> could be achieved by merely adding an element of randomness to the mechanism of option <a>. The latter is what we see in Darwinian Evolution : a continuous chain of Cause & Effect, but with statistically probable effects, instead of absolutely certain consequences.The Freewill vs Determinism debate would be a waste of time, if our world was completely determined or absolutely random. But it seems to be a delicately balanced blend of both. Hence, evolution makes a Natural Selection between the options presented by random changes. And humans make their own artificial selections between forks in the moral highway, based not on chance, but on personal preferences. Randomness is the "structural problem" in an otherwise flawless machine for replication of identical clones.

With those alternatives in mind, I have created my own personal theory of FreeWill within Determinism. It's not based on any particular religious doctrine, or philosophical authority. It's also grounded on neither Theist nor Atheist assumptions, but on a moderate philosophical position. This theory is how I justify the assumption that my socially significant choices are free-enough to make me morally responsible, and morally laudable.

Evolution -- a game of chance : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sc ... ervations/ .

Rationalism versus Fatalism : Freewill Within Determinism
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page67.html