Friday Question: If we have no coherent framework of normative belief how do we define divergence from reality?
Doug Chaplin is one of those bloggers who doesn’t post much, but you really wish he did.
In Doug’s post entitled: Belief and Insanity, he relays his brief interaction with a chap who exhibited ‘deviant thinking’, or probably better described as ‘delusional thinking’. Doug notes that there appeared to be a: “dissociation from what most of us would recognise as reality”.
Now, Psychotic disorders and delusion are often intimately entwined, with the latter being a symptom of the former.
So how exactly do we define delusional psychosis? Perhaps we could define it as:
Holding unusual beliefs, which other people don’t experience or share.
or
Loss of contact with reality.
or
A false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence.
I suspect many Christians will have come across accusations inferring ‘delusion’, ‘madness’ or ‘insanity’ in regard to Christian beliefs. It’s no coincidence that Richard Dawkins’ famous book was entitled: “The God Delusion”.
Sadly, there is no doubt that there are indeed Christians who hold to delusional beliefs. For example, I was Tweeted yesterday:
After the destruction of Vatican this March 2012 any Christian that pay tax will die like Ananias and Saphira on 2018
There is no doubt in my mind that this is an example of delusional thinking; however, I also have no doubt that many would view my beliefs as delusional.
If we stick with the assumption of ‘delusion’ as a symptom of psychosis, we are in reality designating ‘delusion’ to the realm of severe mental illness. It is no secret that Dawkins is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig’s statement: “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion”.
In modern times I think it would be fair to say that we have lost an overarching cultural narrative in our society that most would adhere to, and now we have a plethora of plurality of systems of belief and worldview.
In the past, deviation from the overarching narrative held by most of the community, may have incurred the label ‘insane’. The growing tendency in this day and age to label religious belief as ‘insane’ says something for the growth of new, alternative, narratives. In fact, in a plurality of belief systems, will we not witness more and more instances in which folk look upon – and view – those with alternative narratives, as delusional or insane?
If this would be the case and the fragmentation of beliefs and cutural narratives continues apace, could we end up with no coherent framework of normative belief, and if so, how then do we define divergence from reality?
Thinking back to my brief and crude attempt to define delusional psychosis:
Holding unusual beliefs, which other people don’t experience or share
This will no longer be valid with such a plethora of beliefs.
loss of contact with reality
With so many different ‘realities’ believed by so many, how will we define ‘reality’?
A false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence.
How will we decide what evidence is superior?
Doug ends on a thought provoking and slightly ominous note:
I do wonder, however, whether a scientific society with fewer shared and more widely divergent beliefs will either resort more readily to “insanity” an an explanation of unacceptable difference of belief (with its accompanying treatment, perhaps?) or will fail in the care it needs to give those who have a genuine medical problem because deviant belief can no longer serve any indexical value of an inability to cope with reality.
And I think that might be something to worry about.
And so the ‘Friday Question’ becomes:
If we have no coherent framework of normative belief, nor an overarching cultural narrative, how do we define divergence from reality? How will we define delusion?
I’ll pop this in at the end here as it is purely anecdotal, but I have experienced, and know of others that have experienced, Psychiatrists that would most certainly view religious belief in delusional terms.
And just to say that there’s a universe more to say on the subject of psychosis and delusional thinking, but I needed to keep this as simple and short as possible and so forgive any crude oversimplifications.
Tags: Mental Health, Religion Society
December 16th, 2011 at 5:31 pm
Salvation psychology, society as the asylum where individual realities become the delusional thought crimes of madmen. A society where there is nothing to get hungabout Strawberry Fields forever.
December 16th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
Thanks for picking this up with some helpful thinking.
(I’ve no idea why WordPress doesn’t seem to be getting track backs working properly on my site at the moment)
December 17th, 2011 at 10:09 am
If we have no coherent framework of normative belief, nor an overarching cultural narrative, how do we define divergence from reality? How will we define delusion?
One could write a whole thesis on the strands within this question! But within the confines of a blog comment perhaps I can offer the following thoughts:
Firstly, I don’t think it’s possible for any stable society not to exhibit an overarching cultural narrative. Throughout history, when societies become unstable they evolve into something that is more stable, although the process can be extremely painful in the short term. The cultural narrative will evolve over time, and some ideas will get left behind, to be replaced by others, but by its very nature, human society will always be normative. Perhaps the angst being experienced by some Christians in the Western World at the moment may be a result of this inevitable shift away from Christianity being part of the core cultural narrative. (Despite Cameron’s recent speech, about which one could be quite cynical.)
But what is it to be ‘deluded’? I think it’s one of those terms we all think we understand, but which we all interpret slightly differently. I don’t think Dawkins’s title is intended to say that all believers are insane. Rather, he thinks that they have been led to make fundamental assumptions without ‘natural’ evidence; and thus hold a view that is irrational, at least in materialist terms. What constitutes insanity also evolves over time. Views which are mainstream and commonplace today, might once have led to people being labelled a heretic or a madman.
And don’t most of us prime our children to embrace immaterial and non-rational ideas. We fill their heads with such things as Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, and any number of ‘make-believe’ stories, at a time in their lives when they lack the experience to differentiate fully between reality and fantasy. This provides fertile ground for religious belief to take hold, when their minds are at their most malleable and impressionable. Surely that is what Sunday School is all about? On another recent thread I think someone was bemoaning the fact that more of us don’t ‘teach’ children religion, and that they tend to adopt the belief, or lack of belief, with which they were raised.
I happen to think that Christian belief is delusional, in the sense that I think it is mistaken, and is not credible, but that is just a personal view. I have no basis on which to empirically deny the existence of ‘God’, (how can one prove the existence or non-existence of something immaterial and outside our physical perception) but if God is, then it seems more plausible to me to be the God of Spinoza – the monist view that the whole of existence is God. Logically, how can it be anything else, unless we create a tortuous narrative and circular arguments. You may think that I am deluded in thinking this, but who can say categorically which one of us is deluded, in rational terms. It’s all relative. I am the only person who is normal, as are you, as is everyone reading this blog, unless they choose not to be normal by their own standard of normality or sanity.
I happen to think that Humanism provides the best ‘reality’ and normative belief, and I hope that one day more people will feel empowered to call themselves Humanists. But I acknowledge there will always be a need for religion in many people’s lives, and that it’s only a problem if we make it so.
December 17th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
@Simian,
The cultural narrative will evolve over time, the more important question is who are the authors of that “normative” cultural narrative.
Would you not welcome in the face of the executioner a final appeal to the god delusion.
December 17th, 2011 at 9:15 pm
@ Simian: There’s much food for thought in your reply. You know I respect you, so let me just make a couple of points:
“Perhaps the angst being experienced by some Christians in the Western World at the moment may be a result of this inevitable shift away from Christianity being part of the core cultural narrative.” Now, unless you buy into the Hegelian idea that “history” is an impersonal, purposive force, the shift away from Christianity as being part of the core cultural narrative can hardly be called “inevitable”. History is the shared narrative of the culture’s past. While the shift away from Christianity is a brute fact, it’s no more inevitable than the Communist workers’ revolt; the rise of the Islamic antithesis may (or may not) force a resurgence … Christianity in Europe has suffered and declined before.
“And don’t most of us prime our children to embrace immaterial and non-rational ideas. We fill their heads with such things as Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, and any number of ‘make-believe’ stories, at a time in their lives when they lack the experience to differentiate fully between reality and fantasy.” To a certain extent I agree, although children are pretty capable of distinguishing between real and unreal as part of their visual set. However, the rest of the argument depends on making the invisible, or rather by extension the non-empirical, part of the unreal, which is itself dependent on question-begging and a form of ad ignorantiam (“if you can’t prove it true, it must be false”). I find it interesting how many non-believers can accept the possibility of multiple, alternate dimensions and universes, yet can’t extend that possibility to include the immaterial as a kind of different, alternate dimension with its own rules yet companion to the material. I’ll grant you the argument to the immaterial must necessarily be long and tightly-argued, and it has suffered from brevity and malpresentation (which is why I won’t go into it), but it need not be question-begging. Spinoza’s monism is a last-gasp fallback for the deist, but not a necessary conclusion so long as you don’t confine reality a priori to the prison of “what we can derive empirically”.
“I am the only person who is normal, as are you, as is everyone reading this blog, unless they choose not to be normal by their own standard of normality or sanity.” Which is, I believe, the point Stuart was making … in fact, I think it was also the point Gödel made in proving that no system can ever prove itself from within itself without having some grounding outside the system. At some point we have to appeal to an outside, normative reality to which a person’s psyche must conform to be considered sane, else both sanity and insanity are irrelevant.
December 18th, 2011 at 10:48 am
@ Anthony S Layne
Thank you for your thoughtful response to my comment Anthony. I think I was feeling particularly bilious when I wrote my comment, perhaps in reaction to the premature death of Christopher Hitchens, a towering intellect who I will greatly miss.
To reply to your comments:
You’re absolutely right to take me to task over the word ‘inevitable’, which I should not have used. It was a lazy shorthand for my subjective view on past and current trends.
I don’t disagree with your ad ignorantiam argument. In fact I rather like the expression that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. But I’m not convinced it is valid to make the connection with theories of ‘multiverses’ and the like. They are not something one believes in the same way as one would believe in a supernatural entity through faith. The concept of multiverses is just a working theory like many others, on our way to a better theory. Indeed, unless one is a competent physicist and/or a mathematician, much of the theory is pretty arcane. I don’t think it’s useful to try to relate this to belief in such a specifically described and yet immaterial entity. If you can point me in the right direction to find a long and tightly argued case for the immaterial then please do. I’d really like to understand it. I have read fairly widely around the topic, but have yet to find an argument that stands up to detailed analysis. If one starts with a clean slate, then Spinoza’s argument is surely as credible as the alternative. I find it more so in its logic and simplicity.
Interesting that you raise Gödel. An amazing yet troubled genius. His version of the Ontological argument surely expressed a longing for an afterlife, and I think he took great comfort from his proof – but one which in the end suffers from the same inconsistency as previous attempts in defining existence as a property. If we are looking for an external validation of our sanity we surely need look no further than other people around us. Why do we need more?
December 18th, 2011 at 5:02 pm
@ Simian:
I recommend the late Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Think About God. A secular Jew who later converted to the Anglican communion, Adler worked from an Aristotelian perspective, though he tried to avoid what he believed St. Thomas Aquinas’ mistakes were.
For another perspective, try Anthony Rizzi’s The Science Before Science. Rizzi is a physicist who uses a few scientific issues as jump-off points for other discussion, incorporating Aristotle, Aquinas, Fr. Stanley Jaki and Jacques Mauritain; he’s the one who brings up Gödel. You might be a little gitchy about the press label, IAP … they’re associated a bit with “intelligent design” advocates (believe it or not, I don’t think ID belongs in a public school, but I’ve got probably different reasons for that which don’t pertain here). However, Rizzi doesn’t go into ID arguments, except perhaps tangentially, and I recommend him mostly for the hard-science aspect.
I appreciate your point about the math of multiple dimensions. I’m using it as more of an imaginative tool, as a way of looking at the universe, rather than as a scientific analysis. The big issue I have with “Absence of evidence” is that it establishes the ad ignorantiam argument as a default position rather than recognizing its logical weakness; if you’re going to claim superior rationality for your position (I don’t mean you specifically), you do well not to make an informal fallacy the foundation of your position. Arguing from a lack of material evidence that there’s no immaterial begs the materialist position; besides, it’s a bit like arguing from an empty room that no one walked through it five years ago, or from the lack of a surviving manuscript that Julius Caesar never wrote Anticato. You understand I’m not arguing to the existence of God but rather that the “Absence of evidence” position is indefensible from a logical standpoint.
Are the other people around you sane by definition? :^)=)
Have a great week!
December 18th, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Thanks Anthony. I see if I can get hold of one or more of these references.
Regarding ‘absence of evidence’, I don’t think we disagree. The full expression I quoted surely argues precisely that absence of evidence is not sufficient to rule something out, and is a rebuttal of the argument from ignorance – The proposition may yet be true, but we just do not currently have the means to discover the evidence. I am leaving the door open to acceptance of the immaterial as real. But without some form of reproducible evidence, must not our current acceptance of the reality of the immaterial be based on faith alone?
I think the Julius Caesar example is of a different kind. It is possible that there lived a man by that name and description, and it is possible without violating any natural laws that he did indeed write Antico. The thing is potentially provable from natural evidence alone. We know of no way to prove the existence of God by natural means.
December 18th, 2011 at 11:47 pm
@ Simian: Okay, I see what happened … my mind edited your previous post; you’d actually said, “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” but I’m so used to seeing it expressed in the opposite direction that I did you an injustice. My apologies.