Philip Roth on CBS's Sunday Morning

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/03/sunday/main6923076.shtml

Further on in the interview Philip Roth made some interesting comments about religion. A brave man. I wanted to cheer. I may have to actually read some of his books now.

But saying "When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place" is about as pointless as saying "when the whole world doesn't believe in capitalism, it'll be a great place".

Belief in God is a solution to a problem. There are alternatives, many better but many worse but a solution is essential. Belief in God is one solution to the problem that humanity has evolved the ability to reason but without any obvious limits on it's scope. We think we can reason how we should live our lives, how we should govern our societies, how we should organise and control our economic activity. We think a mind that has evolved on one small planet in one set of circumstances can understand the universe. Capitalism, Marxism, Consumerism, Fundamentalism are all alternative solutions to the same problem and I would not say they are better ones. It is just stupid to say the world will be a great place when no one believes in God without thinking about what the alternatives are.

How are capitalism, marxism, consumerism, and fundamentalism alternatives to belief in god?

2> You hint at but don't really say what the problem is that Belief in God is a solution to. Something about how we aren't smart enough to order our own lives or something? If that's it then I heartily disagree.

In my simple minded watching of the Roth interview, I thought he meant that when we get rid of the motivations for all the people who think they can do hateful things because their god justifies it, then the world will be a better place.

I'd never heard of Philip Roth before, but I like the matter-of-fact attitude displayed in that interview in response to inane questions. ("You know that telling the whole world that you don't believe in God is going to, you know, have people say, 'Oh my goodness, you know, that's a terrible thing for him to say,' Braver said." zomg oh noes!11!1!!!!!1!one!!!)

Some of the things in the comment section, though, are headache-inducing. :/

I'd never heard of Philip Roth before

!!!!

Sorry, Jesse. :( I don't read a lot of fiction, and when I do, these days it tends to be either Arab or Iranian fiction, or else some special/niche thing like Lovecraft or etc. So I probably have a lot of ignorance about the modern American fiction scene. E.g., I hadn't heard of James Patterson, who seems to be a popular novelist, until I read something about him some while back on LibraryThing. On the plus side, it's quiet and cozy under my rock, and as long as I remember to keep fresh batteries on hand for the flashlight, I get a lot of reading done under here. ;)

No problems.

I'm not even that big on Roth, but some days I forget how widely divergent data streams can be.

Portnoy's Complaint was a major book during my teenage angst years. Shows how old I am . . .

"When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place."

And when humanity is finally wiped out, the universe will be a better place.

Not even remotely similar statements.

Too morose?

And when humanity is finally wiped out, the universe will be a better place probably carry on exactly as it did during the billions of years prior to humanity's existence, taking no notice of us whatsoever.

Fixed. It's a very big universe. :) At least the one (?) that we know of.

14: Comforting, is it not? All of this discussion and debate regarding the (non)existence of a god will, like every other human achievement and degradation, be nothing but a blip in the universe once humankind dies off. It will make no difference whatsoever if we discover the Theory of Everything, end world hunger, or even find a way to keep an individual running for two-hundred years. No more problems, no more solutions. The universe will keep on doing what it has, maybe what it always will, without having some pesky monkeys, whose sole existence is the single most contrived and improbable coincidence in the history of ever, around thinking they know better.

All that sound pointless and silly to you? It's about as pointless and silly as Roth saying the world would be better without belief in God. The world would also be a better place if we could be stoned twenty-four/seven while being paid to record our experiences as science finally develops both machines that run on perpetual motion and turn dog crap into gold. But life's a bitch like that.

Speaking of stoned, I'll have a pound of whatever you're smoking!

Comforting, is it not? All of this discussion and debate regarding the (non)existence of a god will, like every other human achievement and degradation, be nothing but a blip in the universe once humankind dies off.

Yet, you post.

Well... *refreshes the brane* Have read the odd Philip Roth book in my time. Sometimes too busy alternating between argh and laughter to finish the book. Probably prefer Chaim Potok. Definitely above those two, Markus Zusak - touchstone didn't work but basically the bloke who wrote The Book Thief.

If bored of the topic, however... One may be in need of a little light relief such asEdward Enfield's Freewheeling Through Ireland or a spot of Joann Sfar.
Discussion may be taken up elsewhere, and carried on ad nauseum but with different source references (one hopes). Sigh.

It's a little hard to judge on the printed page (or computer screen), but Braver seemed genuinely stunned that Roth is a non-believer and prepared to say so when asked.

>19 IanFryer:

I definitely got that impression watching the segment when it aired on CBS last weekend.

I wasn't sure whether she was stunned that he was a non-believer or if she was stunned because he would actually say it publicly.

16: I wish. It's still illegal here.

17: When we're here, the will to boredom drives us all, eh? I don't think Roth did anything that amounts to bravery. Admitting one is an atheist on television in the free world? Should be treated as, "Okay, and?" and not, "Wow, he must be so brave." All people, but especially the media, tend to blow things out of proportion.

I will say though, that the positive side of getting elderly, like around Roth's age, is that one seems to enter a stage where you can speak your mind much more freely than if you're younger and still care about what people think. So I don't frown on him for saying anything he wants to say, but I still think the "world will be better without belief in God" is still silly and hopelessly idealistic.

is that one seems to enter a stage where you can speak your mind much more freely than if you're younger and still care about what people think.

When I was in my early twenties, I used to constantly have people tell me that I was "too young to be that cynical."

Was never quite sure how one was supposed to respond to that... Don't worry, I'll grow into it.

If anyone is interested, Roth is included in the Library of America series. Currently, they've published 6 volumes of his works:

1. Goodbye, Columbus; Letting Go
2. When She Was Good; Portnoy's Complaint; Our Gang; The Breast
3. The Great American Novel; My Life as a Man; The Professor of Desire
4. The Ghost Writer; Zuckerman Unbound; The Anatomy Lesson; The Prague Orgy
5. The Counterlife; The Facts; Deception; Patrimony
6. Operation Shylock; Sabbath's Theater

22> Admitting one is an atheist on television in the free world? Should be treated as, "Okay, and?" and not, "Wow, he must be so brave."

Unless one is a politician.

3>How are capitalism, marxism, consumerism, and fundamentalism alternatives to belief in god?

They are alternative (attempted) solutions to the same problems that belief in god is an attempted solution to.

The problem is that we believe questions such as "how should I live my life?", "why should I live my life?", "how can I be happy?", but even "how should we govern our society?" are reasonable questions that have rational solutions.

I don't want to write an essay here but if you are interested in a view of Western history and politics as various attempt to solve the same psychological problems religion attempts to solve, see professor David Loy's A Buddhist History of the West.

4>You hint at but don't really say what the problem is that Belief in God is a solution to. Something about how we aren't smart enough to order our own lives or something? If that's it then I heartily disagree.

No, it is not that we are not smart enough, it is a question of the capability of human reason itself. It doesn't matter how powerful my electric drill is, I still can't bake a cake with it.

Wow. That doesn't make any sense at all.

27>Wow. That doesn't make any sense at all.

Well we are on pretty thin ice when we put the subject of the scope of human reason within the scope of human reason but even thinner ice when we believe that every aspect of the universe can make sense to us.

At the end, we need to have some realisation that the process of making sense of something, although usefull to us, is actually a process of simplification and corruption, not a process that moves us towards truth.

Human reason is a function of our physical brains moulded by human evolution and influenced strongly by our culture and experiences. It is not a god like power that floats above the whole universe.

Maybe it's just where I live, i.e. the American south, but I said brave because to say something like that publicly here would mean the least that might happen is a pack of evanglists on your porch trying to save you. The worst would be far, far uglier and likely violent. You think I kid, but I do not.

28 marq

No, no. You misunderstood. I meant that you aren't making any sense. Have fun with that!

At the end, we need to have some realisation that the process of making sense of something, although usefull to us, is actually a process of simplification and corruption, not a process that moves us towards truth.

I don't think there's anything inherently corrupting about coming up with laws about the way the universe works (that's what I think of when you say simplifying for the purpose of understanding). Can you come up with any specific examples of something that is so complex as to be beyond the grasp of the human mind yet cannot be simplified without losing something?

A map? A canon?

Or rather, the territory that either represent.

#25 Unless one is a politician ... and not a British politican. The newly elected leader of the British Labour Party has revealed that he is an atheist.

The best explanations I've read are in A Brief History of Everything. I kid you not.

#31 Can you come up with any specific examples of something that is so complex as to be beyond the grasp of the human mind yet cannot be simplified without losing something?

I think this is the progress of Western philosophy that we are gradually moving away from the Platonic ideas that we move towards truth when we go from evidence or experience to understanding/theory to law to design (to designer (God)). We see firstly that you can't get any more close to truth than the infinately complex and variable reality of experience and secondly that more and more of what we try to think about is not actually thinkable. That is, not in the scope of human speculative reason.

The specific examples of the later are made more obvious in the failures of the attempts. Only athiests and fundmentalists would put "proof" and "God" in the same sentence these days but a more shocking and topical example I will give is economics.

Well, chaos theory has shown us that there are some systems that produce such varied outputs for minute variations in input that we cannot practically predict them. But we can still understand them at some level. We understand a great deal about how the weather on our planet works even if we can't predict it in detail more than a few days out.

Economics is hard because it's based on human psychology which we're a long way from understanding plus it's very chaotic.

But despite your doubts about the limits of the human intellect science keeps advancing the limits of our knowledge and I don't see any reason that I should doubt that it will continue to do so far into the future.

#37 jjwilson -- your articulation of chaos theory and how it applies to this discussion is brilliant. Well done!