Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Cherry Picking Problems

Greta Christina thinks religious progressives have a cherry-picking problem. Since I launched this blog with a response to her infamous post on atheist anger, and since her cherry-picking essay is getting some attention, it seems fitting for me to say something about this so-called problem. And I seem to be uniquely situated to do so. After all, not only am I a self-professed religious progressive, but I also have experience picking cherries.

Back in college I had a summer job at a fruit orchard in Orondo, Washington. At the height of the cherry harvest, I was pulled away from trimming apple trees and spreading paraquat so that I could help pick cherries. And I must admit that I did have something of a cherry-picking problem.

The thing is, when you pick cherries at an orchard, you need to be fast. One of my co-workers, Rippin' Rod Ripley, had his name for a reason: He ripped those cherried from the tree so fast that he was actually able to earn enough for a few weeks of hotels, booze, and whores when the season was over (Rippin' Rod was a Vietnam vet who lived in a trailer on the orchard grounds during the fruit-picking season, but was homeless once the season was over and the money ran out).

You need to be fast--if not as fast as Rippin' Rod, then at least fast enough so that you aren't losing the orchard money. But you also need to be picky. Some cherries are split. You don't want too many of them in your bucket, or that whole batch becomes a lower grade. More serious are the cherries that have mold on them. If those go in the bucket, they can ruin the cherries around them.

And you don't just need to be fast and picky. You also need to be skillful. You see, when you pluck a cherry from the tree, it's very easy to leave the cherry stem behind. It's hooked onto the branch at least as strongly as it is to the fruit, so that if you just rip a bunch of cherries down off a branch into your bucket, chances are it'll be a bucket full of stemless cherries.

But consumers want their cherries with stems. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's so that they won't lose out on opportunities to be entertained (tittilated?) by those rare individuals (such as my wife) who can pop the stem in their mouth, work it around for a minute with their tongue, and spit it out again with a perfect little knot tied in it. Yes, my wife can do that. It's part of why I married her.

In any event, back to cherry-picking. While I could be fast, it was at the cost of selectivity and skill. And while I could be selective and skillful, it made me really slow. I never did get the knack that Rippin' Rod displayed out there among the trees, this ability to rip cherries from the trees at a frenetic pace and end up with buckets of pretty, unsplit, mold-free, stem-sporting cherries.

So, I confess to having a cherry-picking problem. But here's the thing: This problem has absolutely nothing to do with my religious progressivism. In fact, back when I was picking cherries at that orchard, I wasn't a religious progressive at all. That was the time in my life when I got sucked in by a more fundamentalist form of Christianity. I was recently "born again." I occasionally spoke in tongues and convinced myself I wasn't just making $#!t up. While at the orchard, I went with a friend most Sundays to a small Seventh Day Adventist church with a pastor whose mantra was "Just believe!"

Oh, wait.

Just glanced back at Greta Christina's post. Looks as if this "cherry picking" language is a metaphor. Whoowee,  am I embarrassed.

Well, taken in those terms her argument's a bit more interesting. But all kidding aside, I think my earlier conclusion still stands: I do have a cherry-picking problem. We all do. So does she. It's called "the problem of the criterion." The problem arises whenever we consider our judgments about our standards of judgment. By what standards do we decide that we have the right standards? How can we be critical of our own starting points without either implicitly abandoning those starting points in favor of different ones which we then use to critique the earlier starting points (but then we're still not critiquing the starting points we have now) or relying on our starting points and so begging the question?

But this problem isn't a problem with my religious progressivism. Instead, my progressivism is an attempt to pursue a solution to the problem--a Hegelian solution, if you will.

I think her framing of the problem as a special problem for religious progressives is rooted in the same misconceptions about the nature of progressive religion that Sam Harris falls prey to when he calls religious moderates "failed fundamentalists" who betray both faith and reason equally. I talk about Harris's mischaracterization in Chapter 1 of Is God a Delusion?, and much of what I say there is applicable to the cherry-picking challenge.

But here I want to pursue a slightly different line of response. Greta Christina, like Harris, is assuming a foundationalist epistemology, and in effect arguing that if you "cherry pick" the Bible you are rejecting the religious fundamentalist's foundational source of evidence--namely, Scripture--in favor of the standards you're using to distinguish the "bad" biblical cherries frome the keepers. And these standards, she argues, are either the same one's that serve as the epistemological foundations for naturalism, or they're standards that are clearly unreliable ("what's in my heart").

And so Greta Christina concludes, in effect, that if you're prepared to "pick cherries" you have in effect abandoned the foundations of faith (blind allegiance to The Holy Book) and so need different ones--and the only tenable ones are the foundations that scientists rely on. And as soon as you limit yourself to those foundations you pretty much have to throw out God and the Bible altogether. And so you should be an atheist rather than a religious progressive. (I just had to go back and correct an interesting typo at the start of this paragraph--I'd mistakenly written "Great Christian").

But this whole argument is premised not only on an implicit embrace of a foundationalist epistemology (as opposed, say, to a more Hegelian approach). It is also premised on an understanding of the Bible that's drawn from Biblical fundamentalism (in which Scripture serves the same foundational evidential role that, for example, sense experience serves for the empiricist) and on a sweeping dismissal of alternative foundations (moral intuition, mystical experience, "first principles of the intellect," etc.)--a dismissal that implicitly relies on an indiscriminate lumping together of all of these things into the same "what's-in-my-heart" subjective category that, while defensible if you assume the naturalist's view of what counts as epistemically foundational, is not defensible if you want to avoid begging the question about what can and cannot qualify as foundational. We need a way to decide among foundations that doesn't beg the question, which means we need to replace epistemic foundationalism with something more nuanced--like the Hegelian dialectical method I favor.

In fact, I think religious progressives in general have made just this kind of shift, even if they've never heard of Hegel. They have lost faith in foundationalism--or, more broadly, they've lost their confidence in the human capacity to "get it right" with respect to evidential foundations. Often, this loss of faith starts with the foundations posited by fundemantalist religious traditions--but their sketpicism extends further than that. Not that they reject the conclusions that scientists reach based on their foundations, but the lived experience of progressives suggests to them that what science can offer based on those foundations is far too limiting, that there is something deep and profound beneath the empirical surface that science explores. To rule this out in advance, to rely on an epistemology that makes any such "something more" eternally inaccessible should it prove to be there, seems as bad as the Biblical fundamentalist's insistence that the Bible offers unassailable foundations from which to build a system of beliefs and a way of life.

And as progressives look at their religious traditions, inherited stories, holy books, and oral teachings, they begin to see that viewing them according to a foundationalist lens is a very modern distortion of what is going on, a misconstrual of what the tradition had been up to until Cartesian Foundationalism got a hold of it. What they see in, say, the Bible, is not some singular "source of evidence" a la sense perception, but an evolving worldview, a holistic way-of-seeing the totality of human experience which, while it presupposes standards for evaluating beliefs, is constantly refining those very standards and methods in the light of lived engagement with the world.

The picture of God in the Bible is not univocal, but evolving. The ethical notions are not univocal, but evolving. There is a direction, a trajectory, that suggests viewing the Bible as a record of the growth and development of a way of seeing a reality that's more mystery than clarity, but which impresses itself upon us and transforms us no matter what standards of evidence we happen to be working with. No matter how inadequate out interpetive scheme, the reality that lies behind experience has a way of breaking through, producing cracks and fissures, exposing inadequacies.

And the religious progressive sees promise in the process. The progressive sees a trajectory that this evolution is taking, and so steps with a hopeful spirit into the evolving tradition to be part of its further evolution in the light of lived human experience. And in taking on that tradition and modifying it in the light of experience, the proper metaphor is not "picking cherries" at all. A better metaphor--derived from my recent history--would be road-testing a new bicycle.

You take it out on the road and, in the light of what you experience, you adjust the seat a little bit upward. You move the handlebars a bit. You decide that the saddle isn't right for your butt, and so you buy a different one. The tires are perhaps the wrong kind for the gravelly roads on which you have to ride--making you too susceptible to a flat. So you get "armadillo" tires. When you start out the process, you don't even really know what you should be looking for. Does the disturbing numbness in your unmentionables mean you've got the wrong seat, or just that your body needs to adjust to riding? What about the ache in your lower back? The very standards by which you decide what changes to make are part of what you discover over the course of road-testing the bike.

If someone watching this process were to say, "Hey, you're cherry-picking!", you'd probably scratch you're head in befuddlement. If they went on to say that you were just being a hypocrite for not trading in the bike for a car--well, you get the idea. The "picking cherries" metaphor presupposes that we have in place a set of foundational standards of judgment (freedom from splits and mold, etc.) that are clearly distinct from the cherries being selected on the basis of those standards. But when we're talking about a holistic worldview, there is no such ready dichotomy between the "correct" standards of judgment and that which is being judged. The road-testing metaphor is far more helpful here.

And you need a vehicle in order to do a road test. It's not something you can dispense with. Even Greta Christina has her metaphorical "vehicle"--her metaphysical naturalism with the evidentiary standards it implies (and the ones it rejects). While there might be a time and a place for telling someone that their bike is a piece of crap and they should consider a new one rather than keep tuning up and replacing parts on the one they have, the mere fact that someone is pursuing such refinements isn't evidence that the bike should be thrown out. The person who tunes up their bike is not thereby a hypocrite. And just because a bike needs more frequent maintenance than a minivan doesn't mean that people should give up riding bicycles. 

I could develop these ideas more precisely in terms of the Hegelian dialectic and its implications. But I already intend to offer a more rigorous treatment of this Hegelian approach as it relates to religion and science, and since I'm getting ready to leave for a conference in the morning, I'll leave matters at that for now. If you want more detail, you can always check out the online video of my University of Tulsa lecture, in which I respond to this species of challege if not to Greta Christina's specific formulation of it. Or you can look at this post, in which I describe the progressive approach to the Bible.

67 comments:

  1. Thanks for the links. I guess I would share the anger as well.

    On your first post.. could I mention that no one is out to eliminate that feeling of religion? The mystical feeling is truly great and to be treasured. If it could be packaged in a bottle, I would be all for it. A more peaceful world might result. Oh, wait- it has been packaged in a bottle, sort of, with psilocybin, heroin, ayahuasca, and the rest.

    The problem is not knowing in the least what this feeling is caused by, what it actually signifies, and taking it to mean that the religion you happen to be raised in is actually true, or some other religion you like with other particular propositions is true, despite no evidence being available, other than this feeling that has been interpreted to support any and every crackpot idea under the sun.

    To a philosopher, this should be the most elementary operation of all- exercising some modicum of skepticism about drawing ontologies out of feelings.


    "... the crushing effects of one so-called religious practice, and then observe with my own eyes the redemptive potential of another, is it really fair to say that I have no reason to think the latter has more claim on being authentically divine?"

    Allow me to pick this apart. What was the "redemption" you witnessed? Did someone levitate into the clouds? I didn't think so. What you mean is that someone was psychologically transformed through the love of a supportive community and some hard work of their own as well.

    That is great and I am all for it. But what does it have to do with.. divine? This is a fundamental category error, yet again seeing the divine in the wonderful nice things and pink ponies, but apparently not in the original horror and damage. What exactly is the distinction, not to mention the evidence?

    "... prophecy that springs from such a font can be recognized by the goodness of its fruits."

    Ah. So the whole old testament was a rather big error, showing god working in rather adverse and cruel ways- a more complex figure. No matter!


    "If there is a God, surely He would entrust the task of discernment to such an inner compass that springs from our essence as children of God, rather than entrusting it to one holy book among a sea of rivals."

    Ah- so now it is .. if you feel it, do it. This can be taken many ways, of course. And in the end, it leads us to the very same ethics and morality as if we had never heard of god in the first place. So why torture yourself with all the theology? Doesn't it seem a bit like a totem you are placing before your house to tell everyone "I am such a great guy"?

    Incidentally, I recently read and enjoyed the Jefferson bible, where he cut and pasted all the nice parables and threw out the rest. It stands as a prime example of what you are talking about here.. cherry picking, to the point that it hardly makes any difference anymore how real or unreal Jesus was. We make our own philosophy, in the end.

    "True faith, by contrast, only reaches upward into mystery, ready to experience the inexpressible, and treats attempts to understand this mystery as fallible speculation that is always open to revision. "

    Jeez- how about we throw out all this faith, with its extreme dangers of reification and one-up-manship, (not to mention plain falsity), follow our consciences, and be done with it? Wouldn't that be entirely more philosophically coherent and respectable?

    ... cont ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. ... cont ...

    Onwards to your current post:

    The problem with cherry picking is its arbitrariness- it lacks a criterion. Where in the orchard, any ripe and luscious cherry will do, in philosophy, only one will do- only one is the truth. You describe this well, but I don't think you solve it.

    "Not that they reject the conclusions that scientists reach based on their foundations, but the lived experience of progressives suggests to them that what science can offer based on those foundations is far too limiting, that there is something deep and profound beneath the empirical surface that science explores. To rule this out in advance, to rely on an epistemology that makes any such "something more" eternally inaccessible should it prove to be there, seems as bad as the Biblical fundamentalist's insistence that the Bible offers unassailable foundations from which to build a system of beliefs and a way of life."

    Again, naturalism isn't opposed to having feelings, or having a conscience. Not at all. It is just opposed to interpreting the crazy taste of a chocolate-coffee-rasberry gelato as evidence for god. That's all.


    "The progressive sees a trajectory that this evolution is taking, and so steps with a hopeful spirit into the evolving tradition to be part of its further evolution in the light of lived human experience."

    Well, if I may toot the Atheist Hegelian horn a bit, much of this progress seems to have taken place after the totalitarian grasp of the church came to and end, first upon the reformation, and more fully after the establishment of freedom of/from religion in later eras, leading eventually to the rather secular happiness of your happy Norway, for instance. The conscience became unencumbered by distracting totems and bizarre narratives, and focused ever more carefully and fully on the human condition.

    Sometimes one really needs to buy a new vehicle.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Eric

    Is it perhaps that the problem of criteria is only a problem if we wish to assert our ability to know the Truth? Isn't an alternative, as JP has suggested, to rather set our criteria in terms of desired outcomes, and then judge any method of knowing against these criteria? So, one thing I might want from knowledge is an enhanced ability to interact with the world, by the way of a capacity to anticipate outcomes. If this is my criterion, then science is the process of attaining knowledge I should turn to, because it is the best method we have found so far for delivering up this outcome.

    If I want from my knowledge a set of beliefs that equate to the beliefs of those around me, then again science is the way to go, as it has at its heart an attempt to construct a set of models which do not rely upon the perspective of the individual measurer for their validity.

    If I want from my knowledge access to a tradition of progressive thought, where each generation knows demonstrably more than the last, then science again looks a pretty good bet.

    If I want something else from my knowledge, say a sense of meaning, value, purpose or connection to something beyond our immediate senses, then science is absolutely not the place to look. Literature, art, religion, drugs... there are a number of ways of going here, in order to deepen our personal narratives.

    The problem seems to arise only when we claim for our system something more than usefulness. At this point, aren't we forced to make a leap of faith, where our own taste for such a leap is tethered to our life story?

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Eric,

    Let me cherry pick a little here. You write

    [...] what science can offer based on those foundations is far too limiting, that there is something deep and profound beneath the empirical surface that science explores. To rule this out in advance, to rely on an epistemology that makes any such "something more" eternally inaccessible [...].

    This image of science as some kind of naive enterprise, willingly refusing valuable sources of evidence as a matter of principle strikes me as something of a caricature. The value modern science attributes to various kinds of evidence is the result of centuries of work during which all these various types of evidence were tried, tested, evaluated and, ultimately and for very sound reasons, retained or rejected (always tentatively, of course). There is nothing a priori about all this.

    As to the main point, I have no problem with the idea of something “deep and profound” (in some sense) lying beneath the surface of what we know. But, what is it? There is a wide range of possibilities, from something strikingly human (as the theists seem to believe) to something so weird and completely foreign to our experience that we can't possible imagine, let alone understand it (following Haldane). If I had to bet, I would go for the latter. Isn't claiming that we can understand this ultimate reality somewhat like expecting a house fly to understand quantum physics? In fact, shouldn't we expect the that the gap between us and what is needed to understand this reality be much wider than the gap between us and flies? After all, we are (relatively) close cousins.

    I have little doubt that the Hegelian process, given suitable assumptions, cannot fail to produce a satisfying result. It will no doubt find an Absolute of sort – it's designed to lead to a particular type of result.

    But how can one claim that it is the truth? For one thing, if the underlying reality is anything like Haldane suggests, won't the Hegelian method totally miss it? It seems, by its nature, to totally preempt the unexpected.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Eric,

    Not to distract from the issues you've raised or to direct anyone elsewhere, but I wonder if this essay by Paul Wallace would shed any further light on the current discussion: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/4796/believing_in_johnny_cash%3A_an_open_letter_to_atheists/

    ReplyDelete
  6. I really like the post, and I think you are right on to name foundationalism as the issue. I think she starts to go awry with this:

    "The only thing that would make these ideas at all special, at all different from any other collection of ideas, would be if they had emanated directly from the mouth of God. And the whole point of this progressive, non-fundamentalist approach to religion is that it rejects the claim that religious texts emanated directly from the mouth of God."

    It's that either/or proposition that really trips her up. Either it comes directly from God's mouth (perfectly "true" for all time with no human mediation), or it is complete hogwash. The Bible was written by people, enmeshed in their cultures, prejudices, and beliefs like we all are. God is not revealed outside of culture, but through and within it.

    The author also takes a very individualistic approach when it comes to Christianity that ignores the believing community. Why should God only speak personally to my heart alone? Is it possible that God reveals Godself in the midst of community, and that hermeneutical discernment best takes place in community, rather than alone? The books of the Bible were written to communities that were part of living faith traditions, not to isolated individuals. This should give some hint as to where interpretation best takes place.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Bernard,

    You write: “Is it perhaps that the problem of criteria is only a problem if we wish to assert our ability to know the Truth? Isn't an alternative, as JP has suggested, to rather set our criteria in terms of desired outcomes, and then judge any method of knowing against these criteria?

    This sounds very reasonable to me. My desired outcome then is to be a good person and to have a good life (in that order). And I find that the religious way of life is far more effective for achieving these goals than naturalism’s way (which I moreover judge to be insufferably superficial intellectually speaking, but never mind). Finally, truth is what makes sense of the path which is successful in attaining one’s desired outcome.

    Here is an analogy: Suppose your desired outcome is to move to the next room and you can either pass through the door or pass through the wall. You discover that the successful path is to pass through the door. Indeed to pass through the wall not only fails but also gives you a headache. Thus you realize the truth of propositions such as “walls are hard” and “the door is the way to the next room”. – On exactly the same empirical level I say does religion work.

    So, one thing I might want from knowledge is an enhanced ability to interact with the world, by the way of a capacity to anticipate outcomes. If this is my criterion, then science is the process of attaining knowledge I should turn to, because it is the best method we have found so far for delivering up this outcome.

    Here I strongly disagree. For starters scientific knowledge (and I have some) is of about zero worth for attaining my desired outcome. My desired outcome is what religions speak about, namely a transformation and transcendence of self. Learning science has been quite a pleasure in my life, but the physical sciences are really nothing more than a fascinating exercise in pattern recognition, indeed a project that will probably be automated in computers not too far in the future. Now I am not saying that knowledge of such patterns is not useful - indeed we use them to build airplanes – but that is not useful for realizing my primary (and really only) desired outcome. Further and even more clearly, the methodology that has proven effective for discovering stable patterns in physical phenomena need have nothing to do with the methodology that is effective for achieving desired outcomes that are entirely different, not to mention way more profound.

    Perhaps I am mistaken, but considering what you write above I get the sense that you implicitly assume that if a method is found effective for achieving one desired outcome, it will also be effective for achieving another – which we know is not the case. You speak about knowledge, but there is knowledge and there is knowledge. And quite frankly the fact that physical scientists have been quite successful in discovering knowledge about stable patterns in physical phenomena does not leave me awestruck. I am more impressed with philosophers who try to understand how reality is and not just how it seems, and far more impressed by artists and their power to create new objects of knowledge, and far more impressed yet again by people who are actually good, people whose creation is themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Bernard,

    You write: “Is it perhaps that the problem of criteria is only a problem if we wish to assert our ability to know the Truth? Isn't an alternative, as JP has suggested, to rather set our criteria in terms of desired outcomes, and then judge any method of knowing against these criteria?

    This sounds very reasonable to me. My desired outcome then is to be a good person and to have a good life (in that order). And I find that the religious way of life is far more effective for achieving these goals than naturalism’s way (which I moreover judge to be insufferably superficial intellectually speaking, but never mind). Finally, truth is what makes sense of the path which is successful in attaining one’s desired outcome.

    Here is an analogy: Suppose your desired outcome is to move to the next room and you can either pass through the door or pass through the wall. You discover that the successful path is to pass through the door. Indeed to pass through the wall not only fails but also gives you a headache. Thus you realize the truth of propositions such as “walls are hard” and “the door is the way to the next room”. – On exactly the same empirical level I say does religion work.

    So, one thing I might want from knowledge is an enhanced ability to interact with the world, by the way of a capacity to anticipate outcomes. If this is my criterion, then science is the process of attaining knowledge I should turn to, because it is the best method we have found so far for delivering up this outcome.

    Here I strongly disagree. For starters scientific knowledge (and I have some) is of about zero worth for attaining my desired outcome. My desired outcome is what religions speak about, namely a transformation and transcendence of self. Learning science has been quite a pleasure in my life, but the physical sciences are really nothing more than a fascinating exercise in pattern recognition, indeed a project that will probably be automated in computers not too far in the future. Now I am not saying that knowledge of such patterns is not useful - indeed we use them to build airplanes – but that is not useful for realizing my primary (and really only) desired outcome. Further and even more clearly, the methodology that has proven effective for discovering stable patterns in physical phenomena need have nothing to do with the methodology that is effective for achieving desired outcomes that are entirely different, not to mention way more profound.

    Perhaps I am mistaken, but considering what you write above I get the sense that you implicitly assume that if a method is found effective for achieving one desired outcome, it will also be effective for achieving another – which we know is not the case. You speak about knowledge, but there is knowledge and there is knowledge. And quite frankly the fact that physical scientists have been quite successful in discovering knowledge about stable patterns in physical phenomena does not leave me awestruck. I am more impressed with philosophers who try to understand how reality is and not just how it seems, and far more impressed by artists and their power to create new objects of knowledge, and far more impressed yet again by people who are actually good, people whose creation is themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi Dianelos

    I agree with this. To think that success in one sphere of knowledge implies success in another is surely impoverishing. What's more, when it comes to the things that I most value, I look not to science for my answers, but to the arts. I am a novelist, and teach drama; my interest in science, and indeed philosophy, is no more than a hobby.

    I would be reluctant to call science's progress simply useful, however. Life saving operations strike me as being something more than that. But yes, I am a hundred percent with you on the overall message here, different methods of attaining knowledge are needed for our different spheres of existence.

    Yet, beneath this agreement, there is still a difference of sorts. I think your characterisation of naturalists is unfair: they too can turn to poetry and music, find their deepest joy in simple human interactions, and strive to live good lives because they find it immensely satisfying to do so.

    And, I think at the point where we judge any form of knowledge against outcomes, we must be careful with the language we use. For at the point we settle upon this kind of pragmatism, there may also be a requirement to accept we don't know much at all about anything.

    I accept, for example, that for many people living as if there is a God enriches their lives, but that in itself doesn't imply there is a God, does it?

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  10. Bernard,

    You write: “For at the point we settle upon this kind of pragmatism, there may also be a requirement to accept we don't know much at all about anything.

    I have no problem with that. I don’t know much at all about anything. But I do know what is important and what works in my life and what makes sense of it all. And that is quite enough.

    I accept, for example, that for many people living as if there is a God enriches their lives, but that in itself doesn't imply there is a God, does it?

    I think it does. Suppose you find that by drinking water you quench your thirst. Doesn’t this by itself imply that there is water? Or, recall the door and wall story. It makes little sense to say to the person in the room: “I understand your experience, but it does not imply that doors exist or that walls are hard, as you believe.

    Some more comments:

    I agree that the physical sciences are extremely useful. My life is much better because of the engineering that uses scientific knowledge. My point was that this kind of goods is *not* entailed in my desired outcome except in a secondary and round-about way. To make this plain, I’d much prefer a condition of being good and having a good life but lacking all the good fruits of science, than the other way around. Quite obviously.

    I don’t think I characterized naturalists but naturalism. Of course there are naturalists who are good people and have a good life, but they (in my picture of the world) are like people who walk through the door without realizing that there is a door.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi Erik,

    I searched out your blog as a result of your interview with Luke for the Pale Blue Dot.

    I'm definitely a lay (about) philosopher and probably not up for the complexities and mental mettle of your usual commenters, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your voice in the wider discussion between atheism and faitheism. I'm a recovering evangelical trying to keep the best of my previous faith and spiritual experiences while accepting and synthesizing the best of the academic and rational critiques of religion.

    I guess I would be both a cherry picker and a cherry pie baker to stick with the analogy.

    I liked this summary "And so Greta Christina concludes, in effect, that if you're prepared to "pick cherries" you have in effect abandoned the foundations of faith (blind allegiance to The Holy Book) and so need different ones--and the only tenable ones are the foundations that scientists rely on. And as soon as you limit yourself to those foundations you pretty much have to throw out God and the Bible altogether. And so you should be an atheist rather than a religious progressive."

    and also,

    "What they see in, say, the Bible, is not some singular "source of evidence" a la sense perception, but an evolving worldview, a holistic way-of-seeing the totality of human experience which, while it presupposes standards for evaluating beliefs, is constantly refining those very standards and methods in the light of lived engagement with the world."

    The analogy of the bike is a good one. I'm into canoes, and I have gone through a similar evolution in my understanding both of what I want in a canoe and what makes a good canoe. There are lots of good ones, but only a few that fit my preferences. Bike picking, canoe picking, cherry picking -- underlying it all is selection and the pragmatic end to which you are working.

    I looking forward to reading more of your thought. We progressives often are not the most intellectually rigorous lot, and I appreciate both your clarity of thought AND the way you express it.

    So thanks,

    Richard

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hi Dianelos

    Thanks for that.

    The thing I have difficulty with, and it may just be that I'm misunderstanding something, is the idea that, because believing in God enriches some lives, this is a good reason to believe there is a God. This is where the distinction between public and private lives seems vital to me. If we are to take people at their word, then it would seem that it is also true that believing there is no God also enriches some people's lives. But by the same reasoning, this would then lead us to conclude there is no God, wouldn't it? This contradiction is my problem, and leads me to conclude that one can not make the leap form private beliefs to public ones. Thoughts?

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  13. Bernard,

    I apologize for interjecting myself here, but the question you raise is, I believe, related to the essay I suggested earlier in this thread. I think the answer to your question lies in thinking about the whole private/public dualism in a different way. The answer may be that there is, in reality, no such thing as a private/public dualism. This is what leads you to believe that "private" belief in God amounts to little more than personal enrichment, like yoga or gardening.

    It may be that everyone in this conversation is aware of the empirical “facts” and knows the difference between saying something like the earth is a certain distance from the sun and God exists. But, it may be that the difference is not of the type where we should consider one TRUE (the measureable difference between objects) and the other (God’s existence) a cultural preference or “private” truth.

    The reason, as noted in the essay, is that the very idea we should consider one “true” as opposed to the other is a story (in and of itself) just like the Christian narrative or any other. It simply masquerades as the TRUTH as if it was simply noting the “facts” and the “evidence.” As Wallace notes:

    “Now, this is a story just as surely as any other. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t for a moment doubt the basics of evolution and thermodynamics. But Myers was not forced by the facts of nature into these beliefs he so forcefully espouses. Instead, he has done exactly what storytellers do: He has told us a story. That is to say, he has added his own stuff.

    The problem is that not that Myers is telling us all a story, but that he insists he is not. ‘Reality,’ he writes, ‘is harsh.’ His story is the story you absolutely must believe if you absolutely insist on not believing in stories.”

    In other words, what you call “private” is exactly what Myers is trying to pass off to the rest of us as a “public” truth. In reality, everyone is doing this. We should simply recognize this as the way (narrative) that people articulate truth. We have to weave the facts and the evidence into narratives that make sense of them and give them meaning in the matrix of a comprehensive understanding of life. The problem arises when a person wants to privilege his private story, by telling us it is just the “plain public truth,” or just the “facts” which is exactly what I think many atheists and those who hold to “scientism” try to do.

    To get back to Eric’s post: Everyone is a cherry-picker because everyone is a story-teller and telling stories always demands we pick cherries.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Bernard,

    Finding that water drenches your thirst doesn’t only provide you with good reason for believing that there is water, but it makes it quite irrational to doubt its existence. (Indeed one realizes that thirst is nothing but one’s suffering the lack of water.)

    You speak of the distinction between private and public lives, but I’d like to suggest that there is nothing like the latter kind of life. All knowledge starts by being clear about one’s own condition, and our condition is that our life is a private one. Some experiences (or patterns of experience) in our life are common and easy to communicate to others (such as “there is an apple tree in my garden”, or “2+2=4”), and these are therefore typically called “objective” or “public”. But all the important things in my life, from my love for my wife and daughter, to my appreciation for Eric’s work, to my enjoying and learning from discussing with you, to my pain for the world, the realization of my own weakness, the whole lot of what really matters, all joy, all beauty, all meaning, all goodness – they are all not “objective” or “public”.

    So, I say, our life in our current condition is a private one. There are only two exceptions I know, two cases in which for a fleeting moment one experiences another person’s life. One is when one loves somebody very much, and the other is when one understands great art.

    [continued next]

    ReplyDelete
  15. [2nd part, continued from above]

    Now you posit a question of consistency, based on taking other people at their word. So suppose a good friend whom I trust very much were to tell me that in her experience *not* drinking water quenches her thirst. Or, to use the other analogy, that in her experience the way to go to the next room is through the wall. Since I trust her, I am left with two logical options: One, to think that she is a different person than I am, or, two, that she means something different when she speaks of “water” or of “wall”. Both options are I think viable in the context of our discussion, namely the existence of God.

    The latter option is easier to deal with: It’s quite obvious that many people mean by “God” some kind of ghostly and mysterious superpower who has created the universe as a new kind of thing, likes to stay hidden but sometimes pulls strings to perform miracles, has a morally questionable character, and, finally, has a rather complicated, kind of arbitrary, and perhaps even schizophrenic, relationship with people. But that’s not at all what I mean by “God”. When I say that “God exists” I mean that nature is fundamentally good. That reality at its deepest is a loving one, indeed is perfectly loving and perfectly beautiful, is perfect in all respects. This is a very simple but also amazing idea. (And it’s perhaps even more amazing to find out how much sense it makes and how well it works.) My point then is that some people will drink water absentmindedly while actually thinking that there is no water, or may walk through the door but call it “wall”. Given the private nature of our life, and how difficult it is to communicate what is most profound in it, such mischaracterizations are entirely possible.

    The other option is also a possibility, in the following sense: How one trusts reality actually is affects one’s choices, and thus the way one experiences life, and thus the way one becomes. It is not unthinkable (and I'd say comports with the teachings of religion) that some people will feel less thirsty after not drinking water for a long while. For some people the hardness of the wall may become pleasant or even liberating in a sense I cannot myself imagine. According to theism people can drift into an experiential place where there is no God, where reality is a blindly mechanical one, and thus not infused and moved by love. A dark place it is, which they say they can illuminate by their own power - which may be.

    So there are at least these two options for me to deal with how other people describe their deepest experiences in the cases you mention. Personally, I am inclined to believe that the “mischaracterization” option is far more common than what I may call the “mechanization” or “despersonalization” option. Indeed, when I listen to somebody say that losing their faith in God was good for them (and especially when they call God a “heavenly dictator”, or something like that), I usually think: good, for they lost their faith in a false god.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hi Dianelos,

    If I may add my bit here, I don’t think your water analogy works.

    True, if water is found to quench thirst, we have evidence that water exists. On the other hand, if belief in God enriches one’s life, this is evidence that your belief is real – it does not say anything about the truth of the belief itself (one way or another).

    Certainly both true or false beliefs can have significant impact on one’s life.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Hi JP,

    It’s not like it’s your belief in the existence of water that quenches your thirst; drinking it does. What good is to know that water exists, and all about its molecular structure, and where it comes from, etc, if you won’t drink it? And if you drink water, having all that knowledge will not quench your thirst quicker. Knowledge about water will help you find it though. - Exactly the same goes in the context of religion. So I think the analogy works very well.

    It is unfortunate that so much is being said about what the right beliefs are. What is relevant in religion is how one lives (and thus, how one is). If you read the Gospels you’ll get the clear sense that Jesus did not teach theology, but rather a way of life (and thus, a way of being). This is the way of self-transcendence and charity which all great religions teach. Beliefs are relevant to the degree they illuminate that way of life. Again, if you read the Gospels you’ll see that Jesus did not teach the truth of propositions, but the truth of life, the good life. Religion goes way beyond beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Hi Darrell

    I think you are exactly right, and this is why the private/public divide feels very important to me indeed. As you say, there are some facts we all accept (the roundness of the earth say) and we may characterise these as public beliefs, insomuch as we all agree they represent our best available description of reality. And equally, as you say, in order to interpret these public beliefs, we all must wrap them in story, our private beliefs. When we do this, but fail to acknowledge it is indeed just a story, something that feels right to us but equally may feel wrong to another, we are in danger of being dishonest, and the example you give of naturalists doing this is quite appropriate.

    This leaves us either with a sort of agnosticism, or an attempt, as per Dianelos above, to solve the inconsistency problem some other way. I'm not convinced by his explanation yet, it strikes me as question begging, but I'll address that separately. Essentially, as is so often the case, I absolutely agree with your distinction between facts and the narratives in which we wrap them. This distinction is fundamental to my agnosticism.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  19. Bernard,

    I am puzzled by your response. You say you agree but then go on write in a way that leads me to believe you might not have quite understood mine or Wallace’s point. I probably failed to communicate my point very well. Let me try again. I’m suggesting that there is no private/public dualism. There are only beliefs (whether we want to call them private or not) that either obtain in such a way that they become public or they do not. The reason they become public or we might say held by a great majority of people is because the narrative (beliefs) that explains or unpacks the “facts” and the “evidence” is of such beauty and is so compelling it resonates in a more powerful way than other narratives.

    I sense you still think something along the lines that narratives or stories are less true than empirical facts. This misses the point. It is, rather, that empirical facts only makes sense and have any meaning within stories and such (the narrative) is what makes them TRUE or not in any significant sense.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Darrell-

    You seem to think it some kind of coup de main to call all narratives stories and thereby cast them all, factual and fantastical alike, into the relativist, post-modernist maw of "whatever floats my boat".

    Yet, some things are facts, and others are not. No matter how many stories one weaves around stellar fusion, it remains an adamantine fact, supported by evidence, perpetually testable and rich with implications for other aspects of reality. They are compelling for philosophical rather than artistic reasons.

    Even if one arrives at a fact by way of gross partiality, even serendipitous accident, its lowly origin doesn't make it a non-fact, even as the most elevated origin in flowery narrative and intellectual salons can't (or shouldn't) make a lie into a fact.

    So, while stories are how we make meaning, whether out of factual states of the world, out of pure imagination, or all sorts of combinations in between, narrative does not "articulate truth". It can just as well articulate lies.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Burk,

    “You seem to think it some kind of coup de main to call all narratives stories and thereby cast them all, factual and fantastical alike, into the relativist, post-modernist maw of "whatever floats my boat".”

    But I’m not suggesting that at all. The problem remains that for you to decide what is “factual” and what is “fantastical” requires you to tell another narrative or story that would tell us how you came to that conclusion. It would still be another narrative.

    What I am saying would never lead anyone to say a “fact” was a non-fact. What it would do though is introduce some humility into the discussion whereby a person says, “This is how I interpret that fact as far as what it might mean at a more significant level.”

    “So, while stories are how we make meaning, whether out of factual states of the world, out of pure imagination, or all sorts of combinations in between, narrative does not "articulate truth". It can just as well articulate lies.”

    Well, if I were to ask you to unpack this and write an essay as to why narrative does not “articulate truth,” you would do so…by narrating, by telling a story! This is simply inescapable. Again, I am not opposing narrative to facts. That is another false dualism just like the private/public dualism. It remains that stories do not cause facts to become non-facts; stories rather make facts TRUE in the sense we all care about, which is more than simple measurement.

    And yes, narratives can also articulate lies and is the very reason for this discussion and many of Eric’s posts. Because it is possible that the naturalistic, scientism of many atheists is a false narrative.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Darrell

    You sense wrongly in this case. You argue that there is no private/public dualism, but that there is a dualism between facts and the way we interpret them. This is the however the sense in which I use the terms public and private beliefs. We are simply using different language, that's all.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  23. Darrell-

    It sounds a little as though you are conflating truth with meaning. Whatever is meaningful (significant to me) is "true" in that classic artistic sense of hitting the subjective mark.

    As you know, completely false narratives can "hit the mark"- both factually false, and more deeply false, like the whole communist eposide. A great story, but not such a great outcome.

    Surely, we construct our realities in the social and meaning senses. And the ones that satisfy our sense of art, our preconceptions, our training, etc. all have a leg up in being adopted as significant narratives. It doesn't make them true in a correspondence sense. Indeed, trusting our sense of narrative and meaning is what brings us no end of bad theories- the four humors, geocentrism, and all manner of religion.

    In short, the whole equation of .. my story is congenial, thus it is true .. either is blatantly false, or uses a rather useless definition of truth.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Burk,

    Interestingly enough, you don’t really address my critique. Putting that aside, I am not conflating meaning with truth but I am noting that a “fact” means nothing or makes any sense outside of a comprehensive narrative.

    I will let Eric address the “correspondence” idea as it looks like he might do so in his next post regarding foundationalism.

    The greater point you are missing is that, again, for you to be able to tell us what these no end of “bad” theories are and why they are “bad” or false, requires you to tell us a counter-narrative. Are you willing to admit that? Further, are you willing to admit that such narratives are not “founded” solely upon an unbiased, objective, and simple plain “reading” of the “facts” and “evidence?”

    In other words, are you making the same mistake Wallace notes that Myers makes?

    ReplyDelete
  25. Darrell-

    "Are you willing to admit that?"

    Sure, one can view anything we say as embedded in narrative. That doesn't touch how claims are founded, however.

    Truth claims, narrated or otherwise, are founded on truth-makers. If one claims that X "exists", that implies an empirical test of existence. If one claims that X is "true" in a correspondence sense, that impies similar empirical tests plus the logic of modelling accurately or not. Otherwise, one is blowing smoke.

    Founding of such claims doesn't have to happen before they are made- they can be made hypothetically. They can be founded after the claim by investigating and lining up the relevant truth-makers... embedded in narrative, if one wishes.

    If you say that a particular narrative "is of such beauty and is so compelling it resonates in a more powerful way than other narratives", then you have said exactly that- it resonates very well, we being sentimental beings, suckers for narrative. The truth maker is how tasty it is to our subjective, artistic, mystical, or various other senses. The distinction between this and truth in the philosophical sense should be obvious- they make entirely different demands.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Burk,

    “Sure, one can view anything we say as embedded in narrative. That doesn't touch how claims are founded, however.”

    But it does, thus the points I raised along with Wallace. Hopefully Eric will speak more to this point in his next post.

    “Truth claims, narrated or otherwise, are founded on truth-makers.”

    This only begs the question. A “truth” maker is made TRUE through a narrative.

    “If one claims that X "exists", that implies an empirical test of existence.”

    Only if the claim is something like “rocks” exist. A claim that God exists is not like that, thus a “test” to find God like ones finds a rock is meaningless and a category mistake. This is elemental.

    “If you say that a particular narrative "is of such beauty and is so compelling it resonates in a more powerful way than other narratives", then you have said exactly that- it resonates very well, we being sentimental beings, suckers for narrative.”

    First of all, does this also mean people are “suckers” for the atheist narrative? Or are people only suckers for the narratives you think false? Perhaps it would be better for all of us to be more self-reflective and critical of our own narratives as we seem to be toward others. I can tell you that such is impossible for the person who doesn’t even think he is telling a story or narrative (I give you Myers).

    Further, you are stating this (cherry-picking) in a very narrow way. Is it possible that a narrative that is beautiful and compelling is also one that reflects and “corresponds” with our lived experience and what we know about the physical world? Could we then say such a narrative is TRUE? To say that it “fits” with our lived experience and with what we know of the physical world is not simply being “sentimental.”

    ReplyDelete
  27. I think that we tend to use concepts such as “knowledge” or “fact” just in order to psychologically buttress our own thinking or speaking. Thus one tends to call “knowledge” (or “fact”) those beliefs (or referents of beliefs) one feels especially confident about. Actually, much of what was once deemed “knowledge” or “fact” was later shown to be wrong. One thing we should always remember is that we are fallible beings; but then any manner of speech which conveys certainty is misleading. Strictly speaking the only things that are factual and of which we have knowledge are our current direct experiences.

    The question then is: What is the most reasonable way to deal with our experience of life in order to build a good picture of reality? To answer this question one must first decide what a “good picture” is, and I think a good picture is one which works well in the pragmatical sense. In my mind all theories of truth ultimately reduce to pragmatism. Take for example the correspondence theory of truth. In real life the only way to find out whether a belief corresponds to reality is by finding out whether that belief works in our experience of life. Which brings us back to pragmatism. Everything beyond pragmatism seems to me to be a kind of make believe, a case of smoke and mirrors.

    Now take two beliefs I happen to hold: 1) My hand has 5 fingers, and 2) God is beautiful. Those who like to make distinctions will say that (1) is objective/public/factual/empirical, and that (2) is subjective/private/narrative/feeling. But in reality my beliefs (1) and (2) are of the same kind. When I consider the specific experience of watching my hand I always see it having 5 fingers. And when I consider the whole of my experience of life I always see that God is beautiful. One might counter that we “know” that hands exist, but we don’t “know” that God exists. But, again, there is no such sharp difference in my cognitive reality. The same way I can’t make sense of my experience of looking around without seeing my hand (and its properties such as having 5 fingers), I also can’t make sense of the whole of my experience of life without seeing God (and its properties such as being beautiful). The only difference is qualitative or of degree. I feel more confident about (1) in the sense that I never wonder whether my hand exists, whereas I am less confident about (2) in the sense that I sometimes wonder whether some non-theistic understanding of reality might make more sense. And that difference is easy to explain, for (1) refers to a simple, superficial, and rather obvious understanding of just a small part of my experience, whereas (2) refers to a profound understanding of the whole of my experience. Thus I submit that our cognitive reality is one of continuous variation, and that to use binary distinctions such as objective/subjective, public/private, factual/narrative, truth/meaning – responds to the need of simplifying things. Which is fine unless one forgets the fact that one is simplifying things and starts claiming a real and sharp distinction where there is none, in which case one commits the error of misdescribing one’s cognitive reality.

    [continues bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  28. [2nd part, continues from above]

    So, why is there the need for simplifying things? Because our life is private and in order to communicate experiences and beliefs about them to others we need some kind of language. In the case of superficial experiences or beliefs (such as those that refer to physical phenomena, the subject matter of the physical sciences) it turns out that the language needed is elementary and straightforward, which simply reflects the superficial nature of its subject matter (“superficial” in the sense of being cognitively obvious, such as counting fingers). But whet one gets to communicate deeper and more important experiences and beliefs then it’s more difficult to do this effectively and avoid misunderstandings. At this juncture we sometimes try to simplify matters by applying such binary distinctions. And sometimes we find that using “a narrative” (whether a parable or an analogy or some other kind of symbolic language) is effective too. The narrative then is a higher way of transmitting information, or, to put it differently, the narrative is a way of transmitting higher level information. Further, if by “language” we understand the vehicle or means for transmitting information, then we find that there are other types of language apart from the linguistic type. Thus art, as well as ultimately the way one lives, are also means for transmitting information about one’s experiences and beliefs.

    I think that the article Darrell links to nicely illustrates the case of a naturalistic narrative. To say things like “Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock” is not only a non-factual narrative, but, I submit, a bad narrative even if you believe in naturalism. One might say that Myers in that bit was resorting to hyperbole to make a point, but even the very common bit that follows in the sense that “physical things obey physical laws” is also a non-factual narrative, as well as arguably a mediocre one for naturalists to use. Incidentally neither narrative belongs to the physical sciences, which produce mathematical models of physical phenomena and are thus free of narrative content. Thus science does not say that physical things obey physical laws, but only that our observations of physical phenomena are amenable to mathematical (aka “lawful”) modeling. Anything beyond that is a metaphysical interpretation often expressed through a narrative.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Hi Darrell,

    I am confused as to what you're claiming here.

    Yes, given an appropriate definition, one could say that everything we state is part of a narrative. Well, ok, but then what? Everything we say uses language but it does not mean that all statements are the same. Narratives are of various kinds and differ in numerous ways, aren't they?

    You seem to deny that these distinctions exist and are significant, instead bundling everything together under the “narrative” heading. Wouldn't this reduce all knowledge to the least common denominator, a mediocre “everything goes as long as it's compelling”?

    Surely you mean something else but this is how it sounds from here.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Darrell,

    To Burk’s “If one claims that X "exists", that implies an empirical test of existence.” you answer: “Only if the claim is something like “rocks” exist. A claim that God exists is not like that, thus a “test” to find God like ones finds a rock is meaningless and a category mistake. This is elemental.

    Right, but perhaps there is way to transcend category distinctions such as between rocks and God and how to test their existence – in a way that ultimately leaves Burk’s claim standing. Consider the following definition of existence:

    It is reasonable to believe that “X exists” if and only if trusting in that belief is found to be consistently useful in one’s life. “Trusting in a belief” means living (and thus making choices) in a way that comports with that belief. “Consistently useful” means that the usefulness is both constant and resistant to challenges.

    I submit that this definition of existence applies to all categories (including physical things, mathematical objects, values, minds, epistemic laws, physical laws, and, ultimately, God.) And that the “empirical test” would be verifying the consistent usefulness of the respective existential belief.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Hi Dianelos,

    You write X exists” if and only if trusting in that belief is found to be consistently useful in one’s life. And this applies in particular to physical objects.

    So, the Andromeda galaxy does not exist because trusting in that belief is totally useless to me. But, wait! Here's an astronomer who specializes in studying the said object, so it must exist because it is obviously very useful to him.

    What is it? Does it exist or not? What you describe seems to be a totally subjective idea of existence.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Dianelos,

    I should have written that, according to your comment, it is not reasonable for me to believe that Andromeda exists because this belief is useless to me. But the point is the same.

    ReplyDelete
  33. JP,

    I’m not sure what more I can say beyond my responses to Burk and Bernard. Did you read the Wallace essay? I think I am saying pretty much the same thing. I don’t think I’ve said all narratives are equal or that many are not false, so I’m not sure how you can read into this that I’ve said something to the effect that anything goes as long as it’s compelling.

    “…one could say that everything we state is part of a narrative. Well, ok, but then what?” But wait, you are getting ahead of yourself. What about the earlier point that many, like Myer, don’t believe they are telling a story. They think they are just stating facts while everyone else (read theists)go by blind faith. Naturalism/scientism is a narrative like any other. People need to own up to it.

    Beyond that, I guess you would have to note something specific I or Wallace wrote that you think wrong or don’t understand.

    ReplyDelete
  34. Dianelos,

    I’m not much of a pragmatist, so I’m not sure how much help I would be here to you. You write:

    “It is reasonable to believe that “X exists” if and only if trusting in that belief is found to be consistently useful in one’s life.”

    But what is “useful?” What would that even mean? How would a martyr or those believers imprisoned or tortured for their faith, even now as we speak, respond to such a definition as yours?

    How “useful” is their belief now? Does their plight make it false? I don’t think so. I think beauty is entirely gratuitous and in a sense “worthless” and of no use other than its power to reach into our hearts.

    This power to change us is not “useful” in the sense that we capture something for ourselves. Rather we are captured and become useful in our service to others.

    I must say however that I agree with most everything else you have asserted in this conversation.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Dianelos

    To get back to an earlier point that seems pertinent, I think there is a crucial distinction between the five fingers vs God beliefs. The first is a public belief, in so much as your claim that you have five fingers leads to certain testable predictions. There exist in principle a number of falsifiers which we could apply (your fingers will be able to fill the slots in this glove...) and anybody applying this test will reach the same conclusions.

    In the case of God exists, the test, how the belief makes you feel, is available only to you. Hence somebody else, as I never tire of pointing out, might apply the same test and get the exact opposite result, and we have no way of determining which of the two is correct. So we can not say, in a public sense, which stands as the best available theory.

    You have offered a way of rationalising why a non believer might feel all the better for it, within a theistic framework, but of course an atheist can also provide an explanation why believing in God makes one feel better in a Godless universe.

    So, as Darrel says, let us own our story telling. When a person says 'the universe is benign' or 'the universe is neutral in its attitude towards us' they are telling stories, in the sense that the truth of the statement can only be judged in the pragmatic manner you suggest, and the judgement will vary from one observer to another. If a person says 'the sun is hot' they are proposing something about our experience of the world which all observers would verify in the same way (assuming they shared definitions, etc).

    This distinction feels important to me, as it gets to the heart of the way the external world constrains our story telling habits.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  36. Hi Darrell,

    It seems to me that your (and Wallace's) criticism of the Myers quote (in the Wallace article) is more about form than substance. Myers is certainly slightly provocative in the first quoted paragraph but the second is a one-paragraph summary of four billion years of evolution. What part of the this one do you disagree with?

    The text has, of course, the form of a story. It is obvious that the sentence Dianelos quotes above is not to be taken literally (“Your daddy ...”) and, it goes without saying, these primeval chemicals did not “obey” the laws of thermodynamics the way we obey traffic laws. Give the guy a break: four billion years in 8 lines...

    Now, you (and Wallace) may criticize Myers any way you like, of course. But what should he have done? Prefix his one paragraph with a warning “here's a narrative”? This is all about form. What about the substance of what he says? There, I think he's pretty much on target. So, again: what part do you disagree with?

    I mean, what's wrong with saying that “Kennedy was murdered” is a fact? Or that “apes and humans have a common ancestor” is a fact? You might prefer to use another word but, come on, that these statements and “private beliefs” (to follow Bernard) are different in kind should be entirely obvious. I don't understand why it's apparently so difficult to accept.

    ReplyDelete
  37. JP--With respect to the Myers quote in the Wallace article. What distinguishes a narrative from a mere list of facts, or a mere sequence of events, is in part formal in the sense of "how the facts are organized and laid out," and in part the metaphorical commentaries on the "facts."

    These things--the very things you set aside--often gesture to a broader interpretive framework within which the list of facts/sequence of events is embedded. Very often in stories, this broader framework is not at all explicit, but it is there nevertheless. It is what guides the storyteller and gives the story the kind of resonance, the meaning, that a list of facts lacks. And where do we find this broader framework coming through? In "how the story is told" (the form) and in which non-literal devices are invoked to illuminate the story (among other places).

    In other words, I want to suggest that you are too quick to dismiss the relevance of the "form" of Myers' delivery and the clearly non-literal elements of his account of evolution.

    In Myers' narrative, the form of the story--the way he tells it--is most clearly characterized by the borrowing and refashioning of the "father" metaphor from traditional theism. He begins with a caricatured account of the theistic story, and notes correctly that in this story the metaphor of "father" is used with respect to God. He then counters that "We've done the paternity tests," and follows up with a brief run-down of the causal sequence of events as current biology understands it. And then he concludes with, "Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock, and he didn’t care about you—he was only obeying the laws of thermodynamics."

    The formal structure, as well as the bookending metaphorical invocation of the same "father" metaphor used by theists, points to that in Myers' story which is not a scientific fact. His refashioning of the theistic father metaphor has a "not this, but that" form to it. In other words, he is representing the evolutionary events as an alternative to, rather than a supplement to, the Christian story. In so doing he has gone beyond describing the sequence of events. Insofar as the Christian story is one of ultimate origins and fundamental reality, his framing of the facts of evolutionary history as an alternative to the Christian narrative presents them AS a story of ultimate origins.

    Were I to attempt to articulate the interpretive framework alluded to by these formal and metaphorical elements--were I to get explicit about what underlies the story, I'd put the following words into Myers' mouth:

    "Theists got it wrong. There is no transcendent creator who is related to us in anything like a fatherly way. If we look for ultimate cosmic origins, slime on a rock is as good a candidate as any for our 'father' in this sense--and such slime cares not a whit for us. The notion of a transcendent reality that lies behind the evolutionary sequence of events I've described, and that is the deepest origin of us and our world--this notion is false. And the idea of a foundational reality that cares in the way that a father cares is false."

    This isn't merely a hurried account of the facts of natural history. Myers is making metaphysical claims about the ultimate reality that lies BEHIND the facts. Wallace's point is that Myers' story is really claiming that what lies behind these facts is NOTHING--making the story ironic to the core. I'm not totally sure if he's right about this last point, but he may be.

    ReplyDelete
  38. JP,

    I would echo Eric’s points. I would also suggest that you are not taking Myers few statements noted in the Wallace article in the context of Myer’s wider writings. He is certainly never just stating “facts.” He is interpreting facts. He is doing what we all do, but he is acting as if he is just giving us the straight truth as it were.

    ReplyDelete
  39. Hi Eric

    The problem here is that in order to make your point, you have caricatured the Myers piece for your own purposes. He may, using the father metaphor, be saying something as simple as: when it comes to explaining our physical existence, evolution is the current best mechanical explanation we have. We are of course free to attach any old story we like to this explanation, but the only way we have of choosing between such stories is by the goodness of personal fit, a subjective process. Hence, evolution is a different type of explanation than theism, as theism lacks any specific mechanism that is open to testing and becomes one of an infinite number of live possibilities. Without discussing this with Myers, we have no way of knowing whether your caricature is more accurate than mine. Which is an excellent reason not to use caricature as the basis of argument, I would have thought.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  40. Thanks JP and Darrell for offering criticisms to my definition. Criticisms are always useful for either they will be successful lowering one’s confidence in an idea or else will not be successful increasing one’s confidence. Either way the clarity of one’s thinking is increased. And as one’s own power of imagination is limited (not to mention one tends to fall in love with one’s own ideas) it is extraordinary useful to get other people to criticize one’s thought. So, here are my comments:

    JP, as it happens my belief in the existence of the Andromeda galaxy has been quite useful, and I can remember exactly how. But that’s an accident. Suppose I had just fleetingly read in some science book that the closest galaxy to ours is called Andromeda, and based on that experience formed the belief that the Andromeda galaxy exists. How would that belief be useful to me? Well, it would be useful in that it forms part of my greater belief system related to the content of the physical sciences, a belief system that has been useful in giving me some intellectual pleasure as well as having been put to practical use in my life. It would be useful when I read an article related to astronomy. And so on.

    Let me try to buttress my definition by offering the following argument. Suppose an existential belief of mine were absolutely useless to me in all direct or indirect ways. Then I submit it would have been unreasonable for me to expend the energy to learn about that belief. And much more seriously, that belief would carry no meaning whatsoever for me. For it did carry some meaning then I could use that meaning to explain in what way the truth of that belief could be useful.

    At this juncture one may note that my definition (which is a belief about the reasonable way to think about existence) is not unlike logical positivism. So let me check whether my definition passes its application to itself. As it happens I have found that belief about existence to be quite useful in that I do not have to ponder different categories of existents and the respective different epistemic methods for thinking about them. So, I say, unlike logical positivism, my definition passes its self-referential test.

    [continues bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  41. [2nd part, continued from above]

    Darrell, you write: “But what is “useful?” What would that even mean?

    I’d say that “useful” characterizes anything that helps one attain one’s goals, anything that makes it more probable that one will realize one’s goals. Now there is a problem with that understanding of “useful” in the context of my definition, namely that for people with different goals different (and perhaps mutually contradictory) existential beliefs will be reasonable (according to that definition). But when we ponder the actual state of philosophical discourse that is precisely the case, isn’t it? In real life beliefs are tools, and the reasonableness of a tool depends on the particular goal one has. In any case the above problem disappears when I focus on the ultimate goal I have in life, and which goal I believe is the natural end of us all, the in-built hard-wired goal if you will, namely to be a good person and have a good life.

    How would a martyr or those believers imprisoned or tortured for their faith, even now as we speak, respond to such a definition as yours?

    I think they would respond positively, because by their way of life they realize a goal they have, namely to be good people. And in that process they create imperishable treasure. Following the path of Christ may lead to suffering, but will always cause one’s very being to be transformed into resembling Christ. That’s the greatest treasure there is, because it increases the value of what one is. Therefore belief in Christ is the most useful belief there is. (By “belief in Christ” I mean belief in the way, the truth, and the life which Christ embodies.)

    In other words: Those existential beliefs which illuminate and make sense of the religious way of life are reasonable, because such beliefs are found to be consistently useful in attaining the natural goal of one’s being, namely self-perfection (what I call “being good and having a good life”).

    I think beauty is entirely gratuitous and in a sense “worthless” and of no use other than its power to reach into our hearts.

    Ah, but the experience of beauty is close to central in our goals, so beliefs that consistently help us attain such a goal are very useful indeed. I find that epistemological beliefs are of this kind, for it is an empirical fact of our condition that the clearer the thinking and the deeper the understanding the more beautiful our experience of what we think or of what we understand.

    This power to change us is not “useful” in the sense that we capture something for ourselves. Rather we are captured and become useful in our service to others.

    I agree but I fail to see the distinction. Capturing something good for ourselves (and/or being captured by something good) cannot fail to profit others too. It is impossible to become a better person without others being helped. There is an intrinsic unity between all persons.

    ReplyDelete
  42. Bernard,

    You write: “To get back to an earlier point that seems pertinent, I think there is a crucial distinction between the five fingers vs God beliefs. The first is a public belief, in so much as your claim that you have five fingers leads to certain testable predictions. [snip] In the case of God exists, the test, how the belief makes you feel, is available only to you. Hence somebody else, as I never tire of pointing out, might apply the same test and get the exact opposite result, and we have no way of determining which of the two is correct.

    I strenuously disagree.

    The existence of God leads to testable predictions too. The difference is one of degree. The number of fingers is a trivial thing to test, can be done at very low cost, and has no special relevance. In contrast to test the existence of God requires some really serious investment of oneself, and is then life transforming. Also, both tests are “public” in the sense that most everybody can try them.

    Further our whole life is strictly speaking nothing but “feelings”, and feelings are anyway the most precious things we have. Suppose you are ill and take some medicine which cures you; would it make any sense to say, “well that’s just a good feeling”? Or suppose you are thirsty, drink water, and feel satisfied – is that only a good feeling? Or suppose you find out that loving your wife makes her more beautiful even while she is getting old – is that only a feeling? Or suppose you are afraid, you pray, and you feel strong and do the right thing – is that just about a feeling and nothing more? In conclusion, people lead a religious life because it has a major impact in their experience of life – how exactly is that not an empirical testing?

    Now in reality things are not as simple. Perhaps there are life-stories where religion does not work well (even though I kind of doubt it). To really test the truth religion requires a kind of personal commitment that few people risk making – certainly I haven’t so far. On the other hand for many people indeed religion (that is, in short, the belief that reality is transcendental and fundamentally good) works very well indeed even at a relatively small level of commitment. My point is that the idea that religion is just some kind of make-believe story that “feels” good – grossly fails to correspond to how things actually are. This idea is quite alien even to my own lukewarm religious condition.

    an atheist can also provide an explanation why believing in God makes one feel better in a Godless universe.

    Right, religion is a natural phenomenon which naturalism can indeed explain (at least in principle). So? If God exists, do you think God would make theistic belief an un-natural phenomenon? Naturalism can also explain why we experience that apples fall towards the earth, and why many of us believe that 2+2=4, and why many of us believe in astrology. I find it always impressive how naturalists often point out that naturalism can explain why people believe in X or why people feel Y, as if this has any relevance whatsoever in the theism versus naturalism discourse. (See in this context the so-called genetic fallacy.)

    ReplyDelete
  43. JP,

    You write: “Myers is certainly slightly provocative in the first quoted paragraph but the second is a one-paragraph summary of four billion years of evolution. What part of the this one do you disagree with?

    What about “We are apes and the descendants of apes”? In just 8 words Myers manages to make 2 gross mistakes in his own field of professional expertise.

    ReplyDelete
  44. Dianelos,

    I think I understand your point and I get what you are saying. It is probably just a difference of emphasis and sensibility. In our modern Western world of consumerism and extreme individualism, where everything is thought of in terms of “ME” and how something can be consumed or used by “ME,” I just don’t think pragmatism or the idea of God’s existence or Christianity being put forward as something “useful” is a good idea. I think it will then be seen in the light of just another thing we can consume or use.

    I don’t think any type of cost/benefit analysis can do justice to what it means to love God or our neighbor. Once we try and articulate such an analysis, something, it seems to me anyway, is always lost.

    ReplyDelete
  45. Hi Dianelos

    I feel you may be missing the point I'm making here. In the finger case, only one conclusion is open to anybody who tests the proposition, whereas in the case of God's existence, the test you suggest is such that the result may vary depending upon the person carrying the test out. I may find, through living out the proposition that there is no God, that this is life enhancing,and you may find the opposite. There appears to be no room in your system for resolving this difference, whereas if we differ over the number of fingers you have, this difference can be resolved. Hence we can say the private/public divide is a clear one, and to my mind an important one worth highlighting.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  46. Darrell,

    You write: “ I don’t think any type of cost/benefit analysis can do justice to what it means to love God or our neighbor. Once we try and articulate such an analysis, something, it seems to me anyway, is always lost.

    I wonder about that. Please consider:

    I posit that we are made in such a way that we find it psychologically impossible to wish for something that hurts us. In the very few cases where I actually chose the right and hard thing to do, I did it because I realized that not choosing it would hurt me even more.

    Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly calls us to consider what profits us.

    Theism is a positive worldview in which all shall be well in the end. Thus while it is true that one’s desire to be well may mislead one to pick the wrong path, picking the right path is guaranteed to do us well. Therefore one should *not* pick a path which one thinks will not do one well.

    Helping others is empirically found to be one of the greatest joys in life anyway. I suspect that the greatest joy of all is to give oneself up. There are these hauntingly beautiful but paradoxical sounding bits in the Gospels where Jesus says things like: we must give in order to be filled, we must die in order to find life, we must not resist evil in order to conquer it, etc.

    And finally, consumerism is not really good for us. Consumerism is like a drug, a fleeting sense of pleasure which leads one into a sea of misery.

    ReplyDelete
  47. Hi Bernard,

    Please consider what I write bellow not as an argument but as a factual description of my condition:

    God is in my life a present thing, a thing which helps me see the order and meaning of my life, in whose light all strike me as being more beautiful, a source of real strength and real joy. Could it all be an illusion? It could, but 1) the existence of the external world could be an illusion too – by which I mean that there is a point of consistency beyond which worrying about illusions becomes irrational, and 2) I have diligently studied the alternative view of naturalism and have found it both intellectually and experientially to be way inferior (not to mention to almost universally suffer from the delusion that the success of the physical sciences implies or requires naturalism). As there is only one reality in which we all exist, I must hold that the theistic reality in which I find myself existing and empirically interacting with is that one reality.

    I have considered the fact which you regard as being particularly relevant, namely that other honest and reasonable people disagree with me in the basic sense that they experience reality in a way that is clearly different from the way I experience it. But this fact is entirely compatible with my understanding of reality, so I find in this fact no grounds for a potential defeater. I think it is a fact that one’s experience of reality depends to a high degree on how one is as the result partly of chance and partly of the choices one has made in the past. So, to mention a trivial example, if by chance or by choice you have learned Chinese you will experience the sounds of spoken Chinese very differently than one who does not understand that language. More significantly, our moral choices will affect how we experience the intrinsic goodness on which reality rests. Finally, as I mentioned before, the fact that some honest and reasonable people explain that the proposition “God does not exist” had a life enhancing effect in their lives fits with the premise that by “God” they mean something entirely different from what I mean, given that they sometimes describe God as a “heavenly dictator”, a “thought police”, a “moral monster”, a “magical puppeteer”, and such. Let me put it this way: God, the thing which is present in my life, may be an illusion but will never fail to be life enhancing. Quite on the contrary, the lack of God is life deadening. Thus, I conclude, those people who lead good lives do have God in their cognitive lives but without noticing it. Perhaps God is further away, or is only a vague presence, or perhaps it is a clear but mischaracterized presence, or perhaps they breath God without noticing the fact. But real *absence* of what I mean by God from the human condition would render the human condition literally inhuman. Indeed I believe that such a condition does not really exist.

    In short a fair description of my cognitive state is as follows: The existence of a spiritual order centered in God is as clear and consistent and pragmatically useful in my experience of life as is the mechanical order present in the physical space I now live. The idea that it is all “make believe”, while logically possible, stresses credulity beyond what I consider reasonable. (Nevertheless and for good measure I study alterative views.) Finally, the experience of atheists fits naturally with, indeed is entailed by, that spiritual order (for God loves freedom). As is the experience of people of other religions. It is more difficult but also brightly illuminating to see how the existence of evil fits in a reality grounded on a being of perfection.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Hi Eric, Darrell,

    In know in fact very little of Myers' writings and read that particular sample only through Darrell’s link. And, yes, the first paragraph (that I called provocative) may not be a fair description of the Christian doctrine. I don't want to defend him but, still, I puzzle at the level of criticism his little story gets.

    He tells it as he sees it. What, I wonder, is wrong with that? Even a scientist blogger is allowed this, I would think, metaphysical overtones or not.

    You seem to complain that he's making speculations about ultimate reality without realizing it. This is not how I read him.

    He's writing about history: the history of life on Earth, about what actually happened, about what an observer would have witnessed had he been around for the last four billion years or so. History as it has been painstakingly figured out by generations of dedicated scientists, to the best of their abilities.

    On this, he is certainly on target. (And yes, Dianelos, he may have taken a few liberties with precision for brevity and effect). And, moreover, in all this history, not a trace of divine intervention has been found.

    ReplyDelete
  49. Hi Dianelos

    Thanks for that. I certainly appreciate the sincerity and beauty of this description of your reality. It's not one I could ever share, I don't imagine, because my narrative starting point is different, which is to go back to your landscape metaphor. We see, interpret and name things differently, depending upon our perspective. Such narratives, in the end, are private.

    The pedant in me will continue to insist that we name private beliefs private, and public beliefs public, to avoid the assertion that our stories are somehow something more than that. They are more than that to us, sure, they fundamentally anchor our conception of reality, but they do not have this quality of public compulsion. It is why I might share my private beliefs with others, that they may appreciate them (or indeed critique them, as in this blog), but never insist them upon others. Not so my public beliefs. If a child gets too close to the edge of the cliff, I insist they come back, for my belief in the physics is public and gives me warrant (and within the context of my job, legal obligation) to do so.

    Because I believe (pure narrative here) that an essential part of my being human is the interaction I have with others, this distinction remains paramount for me, and hence any theology that does not make it clear is, for me, untenable.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  50. Hi Bernard,

    I think you are saying that we all experience the same reality but invent different narratives to make sense of it. In contrast I am saying that even though there is one reality, it is experienced differently by different people, which is one reason why we develop different theories to make sense of it. (I prefer the concept of “theory” to the concepts of “narrative” or “interpretation”, for the latter concepts are associated with the sense that one is adding something that is not already there – which begs the question.) I posit that the fact that different people experience reality differently is a major fact of the human condition. I have plenty of evidence for that, starting with my own life and how my experience has changed. The same sounds of a spoken language will be experienced completely differently depending on whether one has learned the language or not. A mathematician experiences an equation differently than a non-mathematician. A parent experiences the presence of her child differently than other people. Etc. There are many examples.

    To elucidate what I mean here’s an analogy: Reality is like an island with a big mountain at the center. Most people live near the shore and everybody agrees that the sea is flat, is made of water, contains fish that can be caught using X method of fishing, etc. Now some people try to climb the mountain in order to get a better view, but they come back saying contradictory things. Some say that the path to the peak goes to the right but others that it goes to the left, some that they managed to see the peak and it is round but others that it is sharp, some say that midway there is a fountain of water which gave them strength to continue but others that the path is bone dry and the whole project of climbing to the peak is hopeless - you get the idea. So what is one living near the shore to make of such claims? One possibility is to think that given the different stories they must all be imagining things. The correct response though is to take people at their word and believe that while trying to climb the mountain they have experienced the world differently. Especially if one also tries to climb the mountain and experiences first hand how different one’s experience of reality becomes.

    So I am saying that the human condition is variable and that reality is experienced differently by different people. Perhaps we agree so far. Now I’d say that there are two dominant ways to deal with this fact:

    According to (my best understanding of) naturalism reality is fundamentally of a mechanical nature and basically consists of the physical universe (or maybe multiverse). Further, as the physical sciences have shown, 1) the physical universe is causally closed (i.e. can be modeled as being a mechanism), and 2) there is a perfect correlation between our experiences and our mechanical brain. The fact that different people experience life differently is explained by the fact that different people have different brains, and thus, unsurprisingly, tend to develop different theories to make sense of their experiences (whether similar or different). It is clear that naturalism is an internally coherent theory which accounts for all facts. And will continue to account for all facts as long as the physical closure of the universe and the perfect correlation between our experiences and our brain holds. After all, any feeling or thought or argument against naturalism anybody will entertain is itself explained by naturalism.

    [continues bellow]

    ReplyDelete
  51. [2nd part, continues from above]

    According to (my best understanding of) theism reality is fundamentally of a personal nature and is grounded in God, who is understood as the perfect being. God has created us experiencing reality for a loving purpose, a purpose which entails that we are not passive on-lookers of a fixed reality, but active participants and co-creators, which in turn is the reason why reality is experienced differently by different people. The idea is that God gives us the freedom and the power to build our own self and thus affect the corresponding experience of reality. The fixed mechanical order of the physical world in which we experience existing in our current condition serves as the scaffolding or the matrix or the foundation on which to build our personal character, and thus build our experience of reality. That experience in the one extreme is called “heaven” and in the other extreme is called “hell”. The direction of personal development or self-transformation which leads into the heavenly region is the direction in which our personal character grows in resemblance to the character of God. As God is a loving person who wants a close relationship with us, that direction is one where we too become loving persons and want a close relationship with others. God is not a passive onlooker either, but actively participates in forming all places of reality in such a way that we freely fall in love with Him/Her and come close to Him/Her. (“Close” in the personal sense of similarity of character and not in the sense of distance of course.) Indeed the love-struck God strives for our love in all places of reality; even in “hell” where our character is far from God’s character (and thus far from perfection) and where therefore one’s experience of reality is that of lacking the presence of God.

    As you see, theism does not oppose the reality of the physical order, but considers it only a part of a much larger order which infuses reality. Given that as we saw the physical part already explains all experiential facts (and thus all data we can use when we make a choice), the question then arises how to decide about which of the two theories is the true one. And here’s the beauty of the thing: In a sense the decision is ours alone, it’s we who may commit “on faith” to the one or the other, a sovereign decision which expresses an initial quality of character which in turn will affect our future development. And further, thank God, the weaker among us have philosophy, which is a discipline that helps one pick the more reasonable theory among various which fit the data equally well. And in my experience, when one compares one-to-one these two dominant theories using any epistemic principle which strikes one as being reasonable, one finds that the theistic understanding works better in every case. Thus, I say, reality is such that whether by affirming one’s sovereign choice and embracing the longing of one’s heart (i.e. by faith) or whether by thinking (i.e. by reasoning) one is attracted to theistic truth. Which is only natural considering that reality is grounded in God.

    ReplyDelete
  52. Bernard:

    With respect to the following: The problem here is that in order to make your point, you have caricatured the Myers piece for your own purposes.

    It wasn't my intention to caricature the Myers quote but, rather, to explicate what I take to be the unstated narrative implicit in the formal and metaphorical features of the quoted passage. Your comment aims to offer an alternative explication of the quote and thereby highlight the fact that the kind of thing I was doing is prone to error. As such, you conclude that we shouldn't impute such an explication without (when possible) checking in with the person to whom it has been imputed to make sure one has got it right.

    In general terms, I concede that point. A couple of things, though. First, a fallible interpretation of someone else's view is not necessarily a caricature, since the latter implies a deliberate distortion for the sake of either calling attention to something that's there in a less obvious form(a legitimate use) or setting up a straw man argument (an illegitimate use). If I distorted Myers, it wasn't deliberate, and my intent wasn't the usual ones pursued by caricatures, but rather was to highlight how the formal and metaphorical features of a narrative can transform an uncontroversial series of facts into a controversial story (with the most controversial elements often implicit rather than asserted). I think this point can and should be supplemented by your point that we can get such story-interpretation wrong and so should check in with the storyteller when possible.

    That said (and here's my second comment), it is certainly possible that in the process of doing what I was consciously doing, I fell into some caricaturing subconsciously because of feelings of animosity that I have towards Myers. And based on reading his blog and his uncharitable attacks on me and others I admire, I certainly do harbor some such animosity even though I try not to. If so, mia culpa.

    Third, sometimes--in fact, I'd say often--people aren't really conscious of the underlying interpretive lenses through which they read the facts. Like a pair of glasses that we look through every day, we can easily forget that they're there. Sometimes it's only when others call attention to them--often by trying to explicate them based on the formal and metaphorical features of the stories we tell--that we become conscious of them. Such external probing can, sometimes, inspire the kind of internal probing that leads to greater self-awareness, even when the outsider's interpretation is mistaken.

    Finally, I'm not sure if you have any familiarity with Myers, but my guess is that based on what I've read of him, were we to ask him if my interpretation of the quote was accurate, he'd say, "Hell yeah," followed by a series of creative insults directed towards anyone who believes there might be more to reality than science discerns.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Bernard,

    “The pedant in me will continue to insist that we name private beliefs private, and public beliefs public, to avoid the assertion that our stories are somehow something more than that.”

    I go back to my earlier point. Perhaps the private/public dichotomy is a false dualism—have you considered such? Perhaps the word “story” is confusing you. I do not mean by story something made up or inherently fictitious or merely a “take” on reality. Simply put, “facts” and what you take to be “public” truths are only TRUE in any meaningful sense when understood as INTERPRETED “facts” by which we mean understood through a narrative of a wider and more comprehensive nature. It is that narrative (read philosophy or faith) that is ultimately either true or false. The “facts” remain whatever they are, whether distance to the sun or that gravity exists—but so what? Unless the extent of your thinking or writing was to only ever assert or write down single one line sentences of “facts” like a numbered list (2+2=4; or “The sun is hot”)—without any commentary whatsoever or any thought as to what all these “facts” might mean comprehensively, then your public/private distinction is meaningless.

    Our stories are not only “more than that,” they are the only things that ultimately matter and they are the only things that make “facts” mean anything and, indeed, why some stories become “public” truths shared by many.

    ReplyDelete
  54. JP,

    “I don't want to defend him but, still, I puzzle at the level of criticism his little story gets.”

    His “little” story, is still just that—a story. Putting that aside, the criticism is based upon (using this one example) a similar pattern of argument in his larger writings.

    “He's writing about history: the history of life on Earth, about what actually happened, about what an observer would have witnessed had he been around for the last four billion years or so. History as it has been painstakingly figured out by generations of dedicated scientists, to the best of their abilities.”

    Here you simply make the same mistake he does. He doesn’t know what “actually” happened any more than a biologist or scientist who also believes in God knows what “actually” happened. You act (like he clearly believes) as if he is just noting the “facts.” In reality, what we have is people interpreting the “facts” and they do this through over-arching narratives or stories (read philosophies or faith). The problem, as noted by Wallace, is that Myers feels that everyone else is doing that but him. Like a news anchor—he would have us believe he is just reporting the “facts.” Nonsense.

    “And, moreover, in all this history, not a trace of divine intervention has been found.”

    Wow. Here you tell us a one line story. You state it as a “fact” of some sort. It is, rather, your interpretation of the “evidence” or “facts.” And your interpretation flows from the stories you are invested and believe in. All anyone is asking here is to keep this difference straight.

    ReplyDelete
  55. Wow. Here you tell us a one line story. You state it as a “fact” of some sort. It is, rather, your interpretation of the “evidence” or “facts.”

    This is exactly the intellectual defect that is at issue, and so central to our debate.

    We use the label of "fact" for concepts that have sufficient evidence by reliable methods to be taken as true- indeed, compellingly true- corresponding with reality, given the linguistic and conceptual context we are speaking in.

    While interpretation is always used, sometimes, interpretation results in a "fact". One such fact is that all life on earth used to be unicellular. It was unicellular for at least a billion years after its origin, with a pretty high level of certainty. Most life still is unicellular. Thus what Myers states is true- is a fact. No re-interpretation is required, nor complicated, unusual frames of reference. Only a recognition of what biology and geology have been telling us with mounting piles of evidence for decades.

    The false equivalence of this with the "interpretation" that some kind of god may exist, and be at the root of cosmology, or be at the root of biology, or at the root of our brains ... is egregious in the extreme. This interpretation is highly idiosyncratic, based on a story that, while apparently attractive to some, is not compelling- it has no element of logic or evidence that makes it inescapable. It is at best optional in its description, and at worst fictional. It is far, far, from being a fact.

    If one revels in free interpretation and story-telling, then one might not care so much about facts. But one might also be honest about it.

    ##

    That said, there is formal correctness in saying that ".. not a trace of divine intervention has been found." is a bit biased. On its own, it is completely correct, but it presumes that the speaker understands what form divine intervention is supposed to take. Since every form it has in the past been supposed to take it has turned out not to take, we are rather adrift on the subject. In short, no one knows what they are talking about on this point, neither the theists nor the anti-theists.

    All the observer can say is.. that by the conventional models of divine intervention, none has been observed in these early epochs of life. Of course none has been (reliably) observed in our own epoch either, so by the unformitarian hypothesis, one is within one's rights to conclude that the whole subject of divine intervention is speculative, not to say chimerical. It is, again, far, far, from being a fact.

    ReplyDelete
  56. Hi Darrell,

    Thanks for this but, I'm sorry to say, the more I read you the less I understand.

    Let's say I tell you I went out this morning, walked around the block, saw a woman enter a red car and drove away and, by the way, saw no sign whatsoever indicating the presence of rabbits.

    This is a story – but why, I wonder, couldn't I say that this is how things happened? Of course, it's a partial story, nobody can tell everything, facts must be selected.

    Or consider this: historians have studied ancient texts, ruins, artefacts, and what have you, and they figured out that Julius Caesar really crossed the Rubicon on its way to Rome.

    Are you saying these things didn't happen? Or that they did or didn't depending on who is telling the story?

    The evolution story is just like these, although it may be argued that the evidence for it is in fact stronger than the evidence for the Caesar story. And, yes, as far as we know, our ancestors were fish, they really were. This is how a (very patient) observer would have seen events unfold.

    Since when has “fact” become a dirty word? I did go outside this morning, really, I did: why I couldn't say this is a fact is beyond me.

    Unless you're simply stating the obvious, that to understand a story one has to know something of the context, needs to know what the words mean, and so on. If so, fine. But let's move on to something more substantial.

    ReplyDelete
  57. Bernard,

    A few additional comments.

    You write: “[Private beliefs] are more than that to us, sure, they fundamentally anchor our conception of reality, but they do not have this quality of public compulsion. It is why I might share my private beliefs with others, that they may appreciate them (or indeed critique them, as in this blog), but never insist them upon others.

    Are you sure about that? After all beliefs which anchor one’s conception of reality can be very influential beliefs, change one’s behavior and impact the world. For example, would you be more insistent with somebody who you think holds a false public belief (such as “there is a largest prime number”, or “the highest mountain on Earth is lies in Europe”, or “Jesus of Nazareth never existed”) than with somebody who you think holds a false private belief (such as “only dumb people lose sleep about exploiting others for profit”, or “women are clearly inferior to men”, or “the Second Coming is near so it makes no sense to worry about the environment”)?

    Or perhaps you mean that you feel vastly more confident about private beliefs than about public beliefs, and that’s why you’d never insist on the latter. But, once again, I can think of counterexamples. I take it that you consider scientific beliefs to be public beliefs, but beliefs literally all scientists once held to be true have later been proved wrong. (For example, the existence of gravitational force fields.)

    So it’s not quite clear to me why the difference between public and private beliefs is so relevant for you. Could it be that by “private beliefs” you really mean “religious beliefs”? And given how people disagree about religion that it is better not to insist on arguing about such beliefs like religious people often do?

    Because I believe (pure narrative here) that an essential part of my being human is the interaction I have with others, this distinction remains paramount for me, and hence any theology that does not make it clear is, for me, untenable.

    To my knowledge all great religions teach that our interaction with other people is of paramount importance. In Christianity we have Jesus in the Gospels defining the fundamental command in terms of loving other persons, there is the bit where Jesus says that wherever there are three people together He is among them, He sees children playing and says that heaven is like that, teaches that our duty of making up with another person comes before religious duties, etc. Indeed the entire moral teaching of Christianity is about how we should behave towards others. So, again, I don’t quite understand where you think theology comes short given your feeling about how essential the interaction with others is.

    ReplyDelete
  58. Hi Dianelos

    Absolutely, public beliefs are themselves open to falsification, and so we can never be certain they will not in time be replaced by a better model. Indeed, this is their defining characteristic.

    With regard to a belief like 'women are clearly inferior to men', would I challenge it? Well, it depends what the person means, I suppose. If they mean something like women are not capable of certain levels of artistic or scientific achievement, then we're talking a potentially public belief, we could clearly define how they consider such things are measured and then see if there aren't some falsifying counter-examples.

    If they mean 'I just don't value women much, and am happy to treat them badly' then they would have a different opinion to me, and I do maintain the right to participate in the social shaping and constraining of the ways opinions are expressed, of course, and would get quite involved within this context. I wouldn't however think of them as being wrong in the way that I think of a person claiming stepping off the cliff will do them no harm, is wrong. One is publicly measurable, we will see what happens to the cliff walker's prediction in time, whereas the truthmaker in the case of the misogynist is less obvious.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  59. Darrell

    You appear to be making this leap: Because we must interpret facts in order to make meaning of them, the distinction between facts and interpretations is a false one. I agree with the first part of that statement, but don't think the second follows from it. Perhaps you could expand upon your thinking here.

    I would almost claim the opposite. Because we must interpret facts in order to make meaning of them, the distinction between facts and interpretations is crucial.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete
  60. Bernard,

    You write: “I would almost claim the opposite. Because we must interpret facts in order to make meaning of them, the distinction between facts and interpretations is crucial.

    Perhaps the idea goes the other way. All we have are our basic subjective experiences and our cognitive interpretations of them. What we call “a fact” is itself an interpretation of experiences. Which is evidenced by the fact [!] that people disagree about facts.

    The more I think about it the more it seems to me that concepts such as “fact” and “knowledge” only refer to a psychological property of our cognitive state, namely they express how confident we feel about some belief we hold. Conversely concepts such as “story” or “narrative” only express our feelings of doubt. Incidentally, I am not saying that these concepts are useless, for in a discussion it helps to transmit how one feels about one’s beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
  61. Eric,

    Concerning disbelieving that [...] there might be more to reality than science discerns.

    There are two issues here. The first concerns the existence of “more to reality” (in some sense) and the second whether we can know anything about it or not (and, if so, how).

    I suspect that very few naturalists would squarely claim that we can know everything about reality through the scientific method. What many might say is that whether there is “something more” or not, we have no access to it and must accept our ignorance. Which is to say they might deny the existence of any means of acquiring such knowledge. This is a much more defensible belief than the one you attribute to Myers. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was, in fact, what he believes (but I have no intention to ask).

    Strictly speaking, I am agnostic on this. However, I have seen no convincing argument to the effect that such knowledge is possible and I remain doubtful it can be done.

    This is why I think that the question of “how” is crucial: by what means can we know this “something more”? I would think that to know anything about this “other” realm of reality, some form of interaction with it is necessary. There must be some form of pathway linking it to our physical reality – and if there is it should be identified and investigated.

    If not, without a positive answer to this, wouldn't the whole edifice rests on nothing at all?

    ReplyDelete
  62. Bernard,

    I don’t think anyone is saying there is no distinction between a “fact” and their interpretation. What I did say is that the private/public dichotomy is probably false. Of course there is a distinction between a “fact” and its interpretation. It is a distinction that people like Myers and, it would appear JP and Burk, are unwilling to acknowledge. The distinction was my whole point. No one is simply noting “facts” and “evidence.” They are drawing conclusions as to what all those “facts” should mean.

    ReplyDelete
  63. JP,

    Your examples are not analogous; you are comparing apples to oranges as it were. Myers or no one else in this conversation is making simple assertions like, “I went to the store,” or, “I went outside this morning.” No one is disputing in this conversation a question like “Did Alexander the Great really exist?” Again, the question becomes what do we make of all the “facts” and “evidence” once we begin to place them into wider and more comprehensive contexts? Further, there is no escaping the “fact” that we do this through narratives or stories (read philosophies or faith). Such does nothing to make “fact” a dirty word. Rather, it makes “facts” become TRUE.

    The evolution story is obviously not like simply stating that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. This is clear just from the fact that there are many people including biologists who believe in both God and evolution (like myself), but people like Myers would have us believe that the “facts” of evolution should lead any rational person to become an atheist or at least agnostic. Further, he asserts such as if there were a one-to-one correspondence between knowing the “facts” of evolution and drawing the right (read his) conclusions. In other words, he is not interpreting the facts; he is simply reporting and drawing logical conclusions. Of course, such is utter nonsense. He is doing no such thing. He is telling a story. The story may be true or false, but let us have none of this ridiculousness that he is just reporting the “facts.” As Wallace noted, Myers seems oblivious to this critical difference and it is hardly an insubstantial one.

    ReplyDelete
  64. Hi Darrell,

    I disagree. The statements “Alexander the Great did exist” and “our ancestors were fish” are of the same kind (of course, one could make them more precise by defining the terms, and so on). Both are historical statements; they describe some state of affairs, something that actually happened – and both can be verified in numerous ways.

    Now, if you say that to conclude from the facts of evolution that God does not exist is unwarranted, I absolutely agree. But I didn't argued this at all (and neither did Myers in the paragraph in question although, for all I know, he may have done so elsewhere).

    Perhaps you're reading too much in this. I can state the following without implying any larger doctrine: if we were able to follow back in time our ancestral line, from parent to parent, we would eventually reach fish-like animals. Sometimes a statement means just what it says.

    A last point: you're obviously not a fan of Myers and you may have good reasons not to be. But, as you must realize, I cannot answer your criticism of his ideas. I know next to nothing of him and, as I can't read minds, I have no clue as to what he really thinks. I would only say that, as a general rule, I find it more useful to try to find out what others understand that I don't than to find out what they don't understand themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  65. JP,

    My points in this thread and the point of Wallace’s essay had little to with Myer. He simply used him as one small example. Knowing Myer or his writings shouldn’t prevent anyone from understanding my points or Wallace’s. So I’m not sure why that is even your focus here.

    “Perhaps you're reading too much in this. I can state the following without implying any larger doctrine: if we were able to follow back in time our ancestral line, from parent to parent, we would eventually reach fish-like animals. Sometimes a statement means just what it says.”

    If you really believe that people like Myer or Eric on this blog or anyone else in these types of conversations aren’t “implying” larger doctrines, then you are probably going to find yourself surprised rather often.

    Again, the point wasn’t that one can say our ancestors were fish-like as if a single assertion like 2+2=4 was somehow incorrect. Such misses the point entirely. Last time I checked there wasn’t a huge controversy over whether or not Alexander the Great existed and what that might mean in our lives. There is still a huge controversy, not over the “fact” of evolution, but over what it means and how we should interpret evolution in a more comprehensive way. Right? It matters little then if we can equate the two sentences you note. Are they both correct? Yes. Does such even matter given the context of this conversation? Nope. So I’m assuming you understand this difference.

    “Sometimes a statement means just what it says.”

    But what does it say? What does it mean? Right? It doesn’t “say” anything. Someone has to interpret statements. And a sentence only makes sense within a paragraph. A paragraph only makes sense within a chapter. A chapter only makes sense within a book. A book is telling a story. Your point?

    I think I understand what you are saying. If I say, “I’m going to the store.” Perhaps that is all I mean. Unfortunately, no one is saying things like that in a conversation like this one or as to any of Eric’s posts, so it’s a completely irrelevant distinction.

    Finally, I will let my final point here be a quote by Wallace which was the point of his essay, not Myer:

    “What I propose is that no one lives, or can live, or has ever lived, within the circle of empirical science. I propose that no matter who we are or what our beliefs might be, we have always had to deal with the question of interpretation. And that question is not whether to interpret, but how. No one fails to interpret. Interpreting is what human beings do.”

    So my hope, as you put it, is to understand what people are doing when they are telling you what “facts” should mean. They are interpreting. You are interpreting. Interpretations are narratives. Welcome to the club.

    ReplyDelete
  66. Darrell,

    You write: “[Myers] is telling a story. The story may be true or false, but let us have none of this ridiculousness that he is just reporting the “facts.”

    I don’t think it’s up to us to assert what Myers is telling (a story or whatever), and it is quite clear that according to Myers himself he is reporting the “facts”. He clearly believes very confidently that the naturalistic interpretation of the theory of evolution is true and therefore thinks it’s a “fact”. So I think the appropriate response to what Myers intends to say is to point out and explain why his confidence is unwarranted. (To be fair, he is probably unaware that the physical event that comprises natural evolution is compatible with theism. As is often the case he probably ignores that on theism it is the will of God which causes all physical events, whether natural evolution or the natural falling of an apple.)

    In another post you write: “Interpretations are narratives.

    Why not say “interpretations are theories”? I find that the concept of “theory” is clearer and carries less emotional associations than “narrative”.

    ReplyDelete
  67. Hello Dianelos

    yes, this business of what we mean by facts is crucial, and I'm sure within the context of this discussion, many people mean different things, which may be where the disagreements start.

    For my part, I think your notion that the starting point is not a world of facts, but a world of perception, is valid, and I absolutely agree that whatever we mean by fact, we should not mean something that is indisputable, for if that were the definition, the set of facts would be empty.

    I try to think in terms of how people in a conversation are likely to interpret the word fact, and my assumption is that they will take it as contrasting with terms like opinion, or perhaps belief. I think, when we claim something is a fact, we are saying, 'not only do I think this is right, but if you think otherwise then I am asserting you are wrong'. So, level of confidence isn't the defining feature. I am dead confident Tom Waits is a musical genius, but don't consider this a fact. If somebody sees it otherwise, then they can be right about this too.

    I use facts to describe that subset of beliefs where a consensus can be reached as to what is the best current model/theory available. This consensus hinges upon public, rather than private, falsifiability. If the truthmaker or defeater is a personal experience/hunch, then when applied by another tester, the opposite result might be achieved. I exclude those statements for which their contradictory partner can also be true from the set of facts because I anticipate this is what people conversing with me expect when I use the term fact.

    Hence my insistence upon the public/private divide. It is a way, I think, of avoiding misleading people by using words like facts in ways that they will not intuitively anticipate.

    Bernard

    ReplyDelete