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The West’s Dangerous Obsession With Analytical Intelligence

The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.
The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Everyone wants to be intelligent. But no one is quite intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.

There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence. By the Collins English Dictionary, intelligence is ‘the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct’. By the Macmillan Dictionary, it is ‘the ability to understand and think about things, and to gain and use knowledge’.

In seeking to define intelligence, a good place to start might be with dementia. In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, multiple higher cortical functions are disturbed, including memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judgement. In my time, I have worked with over a thousand people with dementia, and I think it significant that they, along with people with severe learning disabilities, cope very poorly with changes to their environment, such as moving into a care home or even into an adjacent room.

Taken together, this suggests that, at its broadest, intelligence refers to the functioning of a number of related faculties and abilities that enable us to adapt and respond to environmental pressures. Because this is not beyond animals and even plants, they too may be said to be possessed of ‘intelligence’.

We Westerners tend to think of intelligence in terms of analytical skills. But in a close-knit hunter-gatherer society, intelligence might be defined more in terms of foraging skills, hunting skills, or social skills and responsibilities. Even within a single society, the skills that are most valued change over time.

In the West, the emphasis has gradually shifted from language skills to more purely analytical skills, and it is only in 1960, well within living memory, that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped Latin as an entry requirement.

In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the seminal paper on emotional intelligence, and EI quickly became all the rage. In that same year, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser. Today, we cannot go very far without having some considerable IT skills (certainly by the standards of 1990, or even 2010), and computer scientists are among the most highly paid professionals.

All this to say that what constitutes intelligence can vary quite considerably according to our values and priorities.

The West Before the West

The Western privileging of analytical skills is rooted in Ancient Greece—but the story is more complicated than it first appears.

Before Socrates, there was the Oracle at Delphi. For centuries, prominent Greeks travelled to Delphi to consult the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, whose cryptic pronouncements were thought to issue from the god of light. One of these pronouncements concerned Socrates himself.

According to Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Pythia replied in the negative. When Socrates found out about this, he did not know what to make of it. So he went about questioning one man after another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of Apollo, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test.

Thus, one of the founding stories of Western rationalism begins not with some argument, but with a rather irrational oracle.

Socrates held that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He typically taught by the dialectic or Socratic method, that is, by questioning one or more people about a particular concept such as courage or justice to expose a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoke a reappraisal of the concept.

But even Socrates, the great champion of rational enquiry, made room for another kind of knowing. At various times, he claimed to have a daimonion or ‘divine sign’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as going into politics or fleeing Athens after having been sentenced to death. When, in Plato’s Crito, his friends urge him to flee Athens, he refuses on the authority of his daimonion: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; this voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.’

So here we have it: the father of Western rationalism, in hock to some mysterious voice.

The Rule of Reason

Plato and Aristotle built upon the legacy of Socrates, while underplaying his more mystical side.

For Plato, reason could carry us far beyond the confines of common sense and everyday experience into a ‘hyper-heaven’ (Greek, hyperouranos) of ideal forms. He famously fantasised about putting a geniocracy of philosopher kings in charge of his utopic Republic.

Aristotle—who for centuries came to be known simply as ‘our Master’—argued that our distinctive function as human beings is our unique capacity to reason, and therefore that our supreme good and happiness consists in leading a life of rational contemplation. To paraphrase Aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Man more than anything is reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, the best, and the most divine of all.’

And with that, where else could the West go?

Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, also conceived of God as ‘thought thinking upon itself’ (noesis noeseos). In later centuries, reason became a divine property, found in man because made in God’s image. If you struggled with your SATs, you now know who to blame.

When Intelligence Becomes Human Worth

As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, the West’s obsession with analytical intelligence has had, and continues to have, dire political, social, and, above all, moral consequences.

Immanuel Kant—probably the most influential philosopher since Aristotle—most memorably made the connection between reasoning and moral standing, arguing (in simple terms) that, by virtue of their ability to reason, human beings ought to be treated, not as means to an end, but only ever as ends-in-themselves. From here, it becomes all too easy to conclude that, the better you are at reasoning, the worthier you are of personhood and its rights and privileges.

For centuries, women were deemed to be ‘emotional’, that is, irrational, or less rational, which justified treating them as chattel or, at best, second-class citizens. The same could also be said of non-white people, over whom it was not just the right but the duty of the white man to rule.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) begins with the lines: Take up the White Man’s burden–/ Send forth the best ye breed–/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need;/ To wait in heavy harness/ On fluttered folk and wild–/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half-devil and half-child.

Although this sounds appalling today, at the time most of Kipling’s countrymen would have approved of the sentiment. In his lifetime, Kipling was offered (and turned down) a knighthood, the position of Poet Laureate, and the Order of Merit. He was not writing from the fringes.

People deemed to be less rational—women, non-white people, the lower classes, the infirm, the ‘deviant’—were not just disenfranchised but dominated, colonised, enslaved, murdered, and sterilised, in all impunity. As late as 2015, Virginia agreed to compensate surviving victims of its state-sponsored sterilisation programme for, among others, the ‘feeble-minded’.

Today, of all people, it is the white man (that is, the white male) who most fears artificial intelligence, imagining that it will usurp his status and privilege.

But even on its own terms, analytical intelligence is not quite what we make of it.

According to science, IQ is the best predictor of job performance. But that is not altogether surprising given that ‘performance’ and IQ have been defined in similar and overlapping terms, and that both depend, at least to some extent, on third factors such as compliance, motivation, and educational attainment.

Genius, in contrast, is more a matter of drive, vision, creativity, and luck or opportunity, and it is notable that the threshold IQ for genius—probably around 125—is not all that high.

William Shockley and Luis Walter Alvarez, who both went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics, were excluded from the Terman Study of the Gifted on account of… their unremarkable IQ scores.

In later life, Shockley developed controversial views on race and eugenics, using his ‘formidable intellect’ to make claims about the intelligence and worth of others. 

And so it was that a Nobel Prize winner who had failed to qualify as ‘gifted’ came to advocate eugenic measures on the basis of supposed differences in intelligence.

Of course, analytical intelligence is of value. But it is not intuition, it is not imagination, and it is not wisdom.

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How We Can Mean Much More Than We Say

Illustration of the legendary telegram exchange between Victor Hugo and his publisher

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

According to lore, when Victor Hugo wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, he sent his publisher a telegram consisting of a single character: ‘?’ 

The publisher replied: ‘!’

Two punctuation marks had been able to carry an entire conversation—because they could lean on shared knowledge and expectations.

Much of our communication works like that.

Suppose I am hosting a dinner party at 7pm. At 4pm, one of my guests texts me, ‘I’m free from 6pm.’ From that, I will understand, ‘I’m free from 6pm, and I’d like to arrive early if that’s OK?’

As the evening progresses, another of the guests says something horribly rude. I respond with, ‘So, what did you all think about the fish?’ From this, my guest ought to understand that he has overstepped the mark.

As a writer, I am acutely aware that I am conveying much more than the words on the page. As a psychiatrist, I am acutely aware that my patients are disclosing much more than the face value of their words.

So, how exactly do our words and sentences achieve so much?

The Theory of Implicature

The Oxford classicist and philosopher Paul Grice (d. 1988) attempted to answer this question with his theory of implicature.

Grice distinguished conventional implicatures, inherent in certain words such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, and ‘indeed’, from conversational implicatures, which arise from a sort of game-playing, and rule-observing, between speakers.

Let me give you an example of each.

If I say, ‘She was poor but honest’, I am, by the simple use of the word ‘but’, also conveying or betraying a certain prejudice that poor people are generally dishonest.

A few hours before my dinner party, I bump into a friend while stepping out of a bakery with three loaves under my arm. My friend asks, ‘How are you?’ To which I respond, ‘Dinner party tonight!’ By which she understands, ‘I’m excited and rather busy preparing for the dinner party I’m hosting tonight—and so may not have time to chat.’ That’s at least three separate things.

With conversational implicatures, our utterances can take on added meanings, or different meanings, according to the situation or context in which they are uttered.

When we speak to our partner in a crowded place, they are able to derive much more meaning from what we are saying than the strangers who are also in earshot, in part because they are leaning upon background information known only to the both of us. Our partner is capturing not only our words, but also how they work with or wrap around the world that we have in common. Like a compression algorithm, conversation can dispense with whatever information the receiver is already able to reconstruct. The more we know about each other, the less we need to say.

More interesting, I think, is that non-literal meaning can also be created by pushing against certain general and deeply ingrained principles of communication and co-operation, shared even with strangers.

In particular, meaningful conversation can only take place on the assumption that the speakers are, at least on an epistemic level, cooperating with one another.

Grice divided this so-called cooperative principle into four maxims of conversation:

  1. Maxim of quality: That utterances ought to be sincere, justified, and truthful.
  2. Maxim of quantity: That the right amount of information ought to be provided.
  3. Maxim of relevance: That the information provided is in some way pertinent.
  4. Maxim of manner: That the information provided is as clear and unambiguous as possible.

Whenever one or more of these maxims appears to have been flouted, we reflexively assume that the speaker must somehow have observed the maxims and start searching for a likely non-literal meaning.

After my dinner party, I ask one of my guests, ‘How did you like the dinner?’ and she replies, ‘The conversation was stimulating.’ My friend has apparently failed to answer my question. But because I assume that she is cooperating with me, this failure becomes informative: she has politely and indirectly answered my cooking, while also telling me what she thought of the company.

In other words, implicature arises when the Gricean maxims are flouted, or would have been flouted had it not been for the implicature.

We are, in effect, pushing against expectations to save on words. The speaker need not transmit the entire meaning because the listener already possesses most of the apparatus required to reconstruct it. As a writer, I try not to underestimate your reconstructive machinery—because if I do, I risk becoming literal and boring.

Playing with Meaning

Common examples of floutings that, by implicature, are not true floutings include irony (maxim of quality), metaphor (maxim of relevance), and euphemism (maxim of manner). And some jokes as well. When my neighbour arrives late—from next door—to my dinner party, she exclaims: ‘Sorry, the traffic was really bad!’ Once we notice the gap between what is said and what is meant, we begin to see it everywhere.

Flirting is especially dependent upon this ambiguity. ‘Are you staying for another drink?’ can be nothing more than a question about another drink—or not. The advantage is precisely that neither party need decide, at least not yet, which meaning is intended. If the invitation is declined, both can retreat into the literal meaning without embarrassment.

This possibility of retreat gives rise to one of the great uses—and abuses—of implicature: plausible deniability. The diplomat, politician, seducer, passive-aggressive friend or relative, or social media troll can all communicate something without assuming full responsibility for having communicated it. ‘I never said that’ may be literally true, but entirely disingenuous.

At its darkest, implicature can become the political dog-whistle: an expression innocuous enough to one audience but freighted with additional meaning for another. The speaker communicates on two levels at once, while the ambiguity itself provides cover.

The maxims can also be flouted in a genuinely non-cooperative way. Thus, politicians often answer a different question to the one asked, or provide a much longer answer when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, or been preferable. In such cases, most of the interviewer’s interjections are, in effect, attempts to return the politician to the maxims. In ordinary life, we might do much the same when we don’t know the answer to a question, but are too embarrassed to admit it.

Conversational implicatures serve a number of important functions such as: increasing the efficiency of communication; making communication more lively, varied, and humorous; and introducing ambiguity or restraint to avoid being ostracised or otherwise penalised for speaking hard truths.

But this slipperiness, this malleability, also gives rise to a number of ethical and legal problems—which is why legal contracts, witness statements, and the like are expected or even required to be as concrete and literal as possible.

More fundamentally, while we can be held responsible for what we say, to what extent can we be held responsible for what we implicate?

The same leaning on context that enables a bad actor to insinuate without admitting also enables friends to joke, lovers to flirt, diplomats to negotiate, and all of us to communicate far more economically and effectively than if we had to spell everything out. Meaning is not contained in words alone, but arises between words, expectations, and circumstances. Language is not merely the transmission of meaning from one mind to another. It is the art of sparking another mind to reconstruct meaning for itself.

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What the Logicians Have Missed

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato was a master of metaphor. He compared the soul to a chariot and the state to a ship at sea. He compared his teacher Socrates both to a gadfly and to a midwife.

But the most famous of all his analogies is the Allegory of the Cave, in which he compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their entire lives in a cave, are unable to imagine a world beyond.

How exactly do allegories work? An allegory (Greek, ‘a speaking about something else’) is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a myth, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one.

Allegories are often described as ‘extended metaphors’, so one way of understanding the allegory is by understanding the smaller metaphor. Whereas an allegory is a complete narrative that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another, a metaphor is a sentence or short segment that equates two seemingly unrelated things. For example, Solomon 2:1-2:

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

The first sentence consists of two metaphors (‘I am the rose of Sharon’ and ‘I am the lily of the valleys’), and the second sentence consists of a simile.

Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy

What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much. Whereas a metaphor says that something is something else, a simile says that it is like or as something else.

Simile might be considered a type of metaphor, as might also analogy, which involves drawing a comparison for the purpose of explaining or clarifying an idea, for example, if I say, ‘Scientists are as blind to their own paradigms as fish to water.’

In fact, the second sentence from the Solomon (‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’) is more properly an analogy than a simple simile. But my broader point is this: they are close relatives and their boundaries are porous.

Metaphor and simile are figures of speech, which are a type of rhetorical device (also called, depending on context, literary or poetic device). They are both forms of analogy, which can be purely cognitive as well as rhetorical—in the mind and in the mouth, or in the mind only.

Metaphor and the Structure of Thought

Unlike other rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and resonance, metaphor is not merely ornamental, but a cognitively respectable way of knowing.

Metaphor and analogy enable an abstract or unfamiliar idea to be grasped in terms of a more concrete or familiar one. What’s more, the superimposition or juxtaposition of two superficially dissimilar ideas brings out any hidden or secondary correspondences between the two. This is not unlike formal deductive logic, which marries two ideas to give birth to a third—and is, in fact, a lot more common.

Logicians and their students prefer to focus on deduction and induction, but it may be that analogy is the principal form of human reasoning.

Faced with something new, the mind reaches for something familiar: What is this like? It then carries the structure of the familiar over to the unfamiliar, enabling us to make inferences that it may not otherwise have made.

We reason by analogy whenever we apply the lessons of one situation to another. A historian reaches for the past to illuminate the present, a doctor compares a new presentation to previous ones, a lawyer argues from precedent. Darwin reasoned from artificial selection to natural selection. In each case, analogy helps us connect the familiar to the novel.

In the words of Aristotle, whom Dante described as ‘the master of those who know’:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

What Makes for a Good Metaphor

The force of a metaphor depends above all upon its freshness and originality, in some sense, upon its disruptive qualities.

If a metaphor is overused, it becomes a cliché, and some metaphors are so tired that they are no longer visualised or even thought of as metaphors. For instance, in English (as opposed to, say, Spanish), we tend to talk of time in terms of space and distance, even if we are no longer aware of doing so: ‘I won’t be long’, ‘Let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’, ‘His drinking finally caught up with him.’ Metaphors such as these that are no longer visualised are called dead metaphors, and language is full of them.

Indeed, an argument could be made that all language is either onomatopoeic (or imitative, like ‘cough’, ‘splash’, and ‘thud’) or metaphorical. After all, what else could it be? The word ‘metaphor’ derives from the Greek for ‘a carrying over’, so it is itself a metaphor.

In its broadest, Aristotelian sense, metaphor is the carrying over of meaning from one thing to another on the basis of some perceived relation between them. Metaphor is a large family, including simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. Here’s a metaphor, or arguably a simile, by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer…it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Unlike tired or dead metaphors, fresh, vivid metaphors like this one are experienced as beautiful and pleasurable. Beautiful because they are so concise and condensed. Pleasurable because, like humour, which they often contain, they exercise our cognitive range and flexibility. And like humour, they can be a little playful, a little naughty, and a little dangerous.

In the words, again, of Aristotle:

To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.

The Most Brilliant Metaphors

Now back to the allegory. Like the metaphor, the allegory serves to convey abstract and at times subversive ideas in more concrete and condensed forms that then become symbolic of the ideas, making them easier to reveal or conceal or otherwise play with.

When an abstract notion is given the form of a person or animate being, this is known as personification. Narcissus, for example, is a personification of vanity and self-absorption, and Icarus of hubris. The Mahabharata, the Iliad of India (although a lot longer), presents three approaches to moral problems, personified by Bhima (brute force, ego, desire), Yudhishthira (rigid moral law, deontology), and Arjuna (virtue ethics, moral indeterminacy), who, wavering between the paths of his two elder brothers, is forced to make difficult, existential choices.

An important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy it as it suits them, and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or indeed, whatever they wish to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds.

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First, Tell Me What You Mean by God

William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794).
William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794). Is Urizen what Blake meant by God?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In February 2012, three of the world’s most distinguished intellectuals gathered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to discuss the origins of human beings and, tied with that, the existence of God. There was Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and celebrated atheist; Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury; and the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Catholic priest who professed to be ‘ignorant’—that is, an agnostic. Kenny, who died in August 2026 at the age of 95, was a philosopher of exceptional range and clarity, and perhaps the ideal person to sit between the other two.

Here, apparently, were the three great positions in the God debate: belief, disbelief, and quiet uncertainty. But there was a problem. What did each man mean by ‘God’?

This is no minor philosophical quibble. Before asking whether something exists, we need, surely, to establish what that something is. Yet people routinely declare themselves theists, atheists, or agnostics without first defining the object of their belief, disbelief, or doubt. You cannot meaningfully ask whether something exists until you have some idea of what you are looking for. And ‘God’ can mean radically different things to different people.

Which God?

At one end of the spectrum is the God that Dawkins principally attacks: a supernatural intelligence who created the universe, designed living things, listens to prayers, judges our actions, performs miracles, and otherwise intervenes in human affairs. Millions of people believe in some version of this God, so it is perfectly reasonable for Dawkins to argue that such a being does not exist.

But it is far from the only conception of God. Aristotle’s God, for example, is the unmoved mover: the ultimate cause of change in the universe, itself unchanging. Aristotle’s God did not create the universe, which Aristotle believed to be eternal, and certainly does not sit in heaven listening to our prayers. Instead, he is the ultimate introvert, described by Aristotle as noesis noeseos, ‘thought thinking itself’.

Spinoza went even further in collapsing God. For him, God and Nature are one and the same: Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’. Everything that exists is in God, because God is the single infinite substance of which everything else is a mode—a recognised position also in Indian philosophy.

Now ask the atheist: ‘Do you believe in Spinoza’s God?’ What would it mean to say no? That he does not believe in the rock that he is kicking? Unless the atheist wishes to deny the existence of Nature, the disagreement is no longer about whether something exists. It is about whether we ought to call that something ‘God’.

What Does an Atheist Not Believe In

When someone says, ‘I don’t believe in God’, what they really mean is, ‘I don’t believe in a particular idea of God.’

This becomes increasingly apparent as soon as we begin stripping attributes from God. Suppose we start with a personal creator who designed the universe, answers prayers, performs miracles, rewards virtue, punishes sin, and promises an afterlife. There is plenty here to believe or disbelieve. Now progressively remove the afterlife, divine intervention, answered prayers, God’s personality, and even the act of creation. With each subtraction, there is less for the atheist to reject. Eventually, we might arrive at God as the order of nature, the ground of being, Nature itself, or some such.

The less we say about God, the harder God becomes to disbelieve in.

At the limit, the atheist and the believer may agree completely about what exists. The disagreement is only about whether to call it ‘God’. Indeed, the atheist who tells Spinoza, ‘I don’t believe in your God’, may really be saying, ‘I believe in exactly the same thing as you, but I don’t think you should call it God.’ More commonly, Spinoza was himself accused of atheism, on the grounds that identifying God with everything amounted to believing in nothing.

The Problem with Agnosticism

The same problem applies to agnosticism. An agnostic typically says, ‘I don’t know whether God exists.’ But again: which God?

It makes perfect sense to be agnostic about a supernatural creator. Perhaps such a being exists; perhaps not; perhaps we cannot know. But what would it mean to be agnostic about Spinoza’s God? ‘I don’t know whether Nature exists’ is hardly a coherent position.

Like atheism and theism, agnosticism depends upon some prior conception of God. Until that conception has been supplied, saying, ‘I am an agnostic’ tells us surprisingly little. The familiar spectrum—theist, agnostic, atheist—is not really a spectrum of attitudes towards God. It is a spectrum of attitudes towards a particular—some might say quasi-mythological—conception of God. Change the conception and you may change your position without having altered a single belief about reality.

Is Dawkins Attacking a Straw Man?

This helps explain something peculiar about the modern God debate. Dawkins is not attacking a straw man when he attacks the supernatural, interventionist God. Millions of people believe in precisely such a God.

But difficulties arise when an argument against that concept of God is treated as an argument against God tout court.

The God of philosophy and theology can be much more elusive. God may be described not as a being but as Being itself; not as one cause among others but as the ground of causation; not as something within the universe but as that upon which the universe ultimately depends. Dawkins’s arguments against a supernatural designer may have considerable force without touching these concepts at all.

The atheist can reasonably reply, ‘You have defined God into existence.’ The theologian can equally reasonably reply, ‘You have been attacking a God I don’t believe in.’ And there, in miniature, lies the problem.

The more concrete and anthropomorphic God becomes, the easier God is to attack. But the more abstract and deflationary God becomes, the less obvious it is what atheism could mean—and, eventually, why we need the word ‘God’ at all.

Why Does the God Debate Persist?

If the problem is so simple, why do some of our most distinguished intellectuals sit there arguing about God without first agreeing what they mean by the word?

One reason may be that belief and disbelief are about far more, and far less, than metaphysics. For many people, religion is bound up with family, community, culture, morality, and personal identity. When someone starts questioning their idea of God, they are also questioning their idea of who they are.

Atheism can function in much the same way. For some, especially since the rise of the New Atheism, it can signify reason, science, intellectual independence, or emancipation from religious tradition. People on both sides may therefore be defending not merely propositions, but identities and the ego defences that buttress them. This may account for the extraordinary heat surrounding the debate. Once people start agitating, it is no longer simply about the facts.

Another reason is that the God debate has acquired the status of the ultimate intellectual question. It seems to encompass the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, morality, death, and our place in the cosmos. To call oneself a theist, atheist, or agnostic is not only to take a position in the debate but to take a position on reality itself—even if said position happens to be incoherent.

The ambiguity that makes the question philosophically troublesome may be precisely what makes it so attractive. Everyone thinks they understand the question, and even ‘I have no clue’ counts as a valid answer. All in all, the God debate makes for excellent theatre—hence the Sheldonian for the venue, while virtue ethics is for the basement.

A more rigorous debating approach would begin by defining God, fragment into more precise questions, and attract smaller audiences.

Three Clever Men in the Sheldonian

Which brings us back to Dawkins, Williams, and Kenny. Perhaps the most striking thing about their discussion is not that three exceptionally intelligent men could disagree about God, but they could appear to disagree before establishing whether they were talking about the same thing.

Dawkins was principally rejecting a supernatural creator. Williams resisted treating God as another object or explanatory cause within the universe. Kenny, sitting between them, professed uncertainty. All three positions are perfectly intelligible in themselves. The difficulty arises when we treat them as answers to the same under-defined question—as though Dawkins were saying no, Williams yes, and Kenny maybe.

Perhaps, then, there is no single God debate. There are only debates about particular conceptions of God, some more substantial than others. Once those conceptions are made explicit, apparent disagreements may sharpen into real ones—or disappear altogether. As things stand, everyone can leave feeling that they have won. In a properly defined debate, some people might have to accept that they are wrong.

Of course, none of this says whether God exists, or does not exist. It makes a simpler point: neither statement means very much until we know what ‘God’ means.

So before you tell me that you are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic—or worse, ask me whether I am one of those—there is something else I need to know.

What do you mean by God? —And, do you know your Aristotle and your Advaita Vedanta?

What I mean is that the familiar God debate is culturally provincial. It tends to assume a conception of God shaped by Christianity: a personal creator, separate from the world, who takes an interest in human affairs. But Aristotle’s unmoved mover already unsettles that picture, while Advaita Vedanta can dissolve the distinction between God, ultimate reality, and the deepest self.

Once we step outside the familiar Christian frame, the apparently simple opposition between belief and disbelief begins to break down.

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Why Are People No Wiser Than Before?

The priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (Oracle of Delphi)
 
The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.

Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.

They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.

They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.

Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.

The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.

Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.

This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.

Cognitive biases explain how our thinking goes astray. Self-deception explains why.

To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.

More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.

For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.

Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.

Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Know thyself.

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If this article spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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