Religious Superiority

Remember that religion vs. human rights debate we had a week or so ago? Here's a great addition to the discussion. I will cite a large portion of the article: ...there are four different questions that Perry might be taken to be asking: 1. Epistemic: how do we know that there are human rights? Religious revelation is one answer. It would be implausible, however, to suggest that it is the only answer. If that is the claim, then Brian Tamanaha has rebutted it. Knowledge of God’s existence has no more secure epistemic foundation than knowledge of human rights, so there is no gain in certainty from stacking one onto the other. 2. Ontological: in a materialist universe, there can be no compelling warrant for moral statements. Therefore, if you believe there are warranted moral claims, you can’t believe in a materialist universe. This is Green’s view. In order to be persuasive, it would have to be shown how warranted moral claims can be ontologically dependent on God’s existence. There are old and unresolved problems here about whether morality is just divine command, whether morality can be a constraint on God, and so forth. The pre-Kantian debates on that question are nicely covered in Jerome Schneewind’s magisterial book, The Invention of Autonomy. 3. Sociological/psychological: human beings can’t sustain a belief in human rights if they don’t believe in God. This claim is obviously silly, and no one in this conversation seems to be making it, though there are Americans who think it is true. It is more plausible to claim that many people’s ideas about morality are tightly linked to their ideas about religion. 4. Historical: the idea of human rights is rooted, at least in the West, in Christian doctrine. There’s no doubt that this is true, if only because Christianity was so pervasive in Western thought before the Enlightenment. (The modern idea of human rights is an Enlightenment idea, as Perry has noted, but the Enlightenment itself has Christian roots.) Some people in this discussion have taken 4 to be evidence of 1 or 2, but that’s just an error in logic. Modern astronomy is rooted in astrology, but astrology is not a good epistemic path to knowledge of astronomy, nor does the data of astronomy need an ontological basis in astrology. It’s not clear to me whether Perry is arguing for 1 or 2. He’s certainly not claiming 3. And he understands that 4 is not particularly interesting philosophically... Of course, there is value in trying to get these philosophical issues right, and so there is value in this discussion. But lurking just off the wings is the very large number of Americans who believe 3, which, as I’ve said, is ignorant and bigoted hooey. One ought to be careful to distance oneself from that. Indeed.