Authority

I've been thinking a lot about what we consider authoritative in terms of what we believe, whom we believe, and how that affects the way we live in the world. After a recent post on my other blog regarding the arguments of the anti-theists, a friend commented:

Do they have to believe in the narratives, to get the results of believing? In other words, regardless of the truth of the stories, do people have to think they are true to be good people?

This has interesting parallels with Socrates's refutation of Divine Command Theory. Does God command things because they are right, or are they right because God commands them? In short summary, Socrates argues that to accept that they are right simply because God commands them, makes for a very limited ethical viewpoint that is not particularly useful. I would agree, and draw my parallel here: people should act morally from a logical, rational viewpoint, and not because of a religious narrative or divine command.

Rather than put an academic argument in the comments there, I wanted to respond here. These are my thoughts (written to my friend) on the matter:

There are levels of belief. I could give you the ten commandments (or any religious ethical text) and you could use it for a guide for living a good life regardless of whether you believe it is divinely inspired ("thou shalt honor no god before me" might be a difficult commandment to follow in a secular mode, but you get the idea). You have to believe in its utility as a guide for your life, but as far as inspiration, it depends on how much you can reconcile your own beliefs with the stories about a code's origins.

The only problem I'd have with your second point and your conclusion is that you're assuming that faith is incompatible with rational thought. We all have first principles from which we derive our arguments, and I would argue that those first principles are no different for science than they are for faith. The content is obviously different, but logical principles remain sound regardless of how you apply them. In other words, A=B, B=C, therefore A=C is used no differently by the devout than by the secular. As far as our daily actions go, we reason from our principles in this way, so to claim that a "logical, rational viewpoint" is incommensurate with "religious narrative or divine command" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Some of the greatest works of philosophical logic (Aquinas, Augustine, Sankara, Nagarjuna, etc) have been written based on religious first principles or a model of the world in which the divine is capable of giving us commands. Does that invalidate their arguments?

As a final point regarding narrative, I'd ask you what your distinction is between, say, someone who follows the moral teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita and someone who follows Ayn Rand's objectivism. In either case, you have a text that you think contains truths that are useful and authoritative for you. You think that the person who wrote the texts can claim authority that compels you to listen to them. You can claim that Ayn Rand was an actual person (if you want to deny the possibility of divine inspiration), but then I would ask why Ayn Rand, someone you've never met, has any authority in your eyes. If you answer that the arguments contained in the text are compelling and convincing for you, I would then say that the Bhagavad-Gita doesn't claim that you should listen to it only because it was divinely inspired, but because it gives you a model for the way the world works and a method for living ethically within that world. Just because the first principle is karma and not self-interest doesn't make it a less useful ethical model. I would argue that you have to prove that belief in karma is either a) false, or b) harmful, in order to deny it as a way to live your life in orientation to the divine.