The play--"Incorruptible," by Michael Hollinger--is a dark comedy set in the Dark Ages. All the action occurs inside a monastery in Priseaux, France, where the bones of St. Foy are on display--bones that have failed to produce a miracle in over a dozen years. The monks, their faith and finances failing them, embark on a mercenary plan to save their order: digging up bones from their churchyard and selling them as holy relics.
My character is, arguably, a monk who never had any faith to lose. The heir apparent to the abbot, Brother Martin sees the churchyard scam as a natural extension of what he does every day: make a living by peddling lies. At one point early in the play, the abbot and another monk are urgently hoping the Pope will see through a deception that sidetracked his planned trip to Priseaux. Brother Martin asks, "Why would he?" When they answer, because it's the truth, Martin dryly declares, "If the truth were always apparent, we'd be out of business."
Martin lives in a community looking for God. But where are they looking? The villagers have sick cows and sicker spouses, and so they turn their eyes towards the bones of St Foy, hoping for miraculous healings. When none come, their faith withers. Jack, the one-eyed minstrel, has begged and prayed to have his sight restored to his mangled eye (the result of an occupational hazard: juggling knives). But now, after years of unanswered prayers, his faith is gone.
Brother Martin, too, is in his own cynical way focused on miraculous healings. In his case it's because miracles (or the appearance of miracles) bring pilgrims, and pilgrims bring money. And the monastery is in rather desperate need of money. Others are readily caught up in Martin's way of thinking--or, more correctly, drawn down by it.
By "miracle," all of them mean a Deus ex Machina solution to their troubles--a breach in the regularities of nature that helps them achieve their desires. For all of them, this is what it means to believe in God: It means there is a power beyond the world that--if you pray hard enough, with enough faith--will break into the regularities of nature and, with cymbals and trumpets, take away some cause of pain or restore something lost.
Today we turn to technology to solve our troubles: medicine to heal the sick, pesticides to drive off the locusts. In the medieval world of "Incorruptible," miracles offer the fickle equivalent--and in such a world, the religions that promise miracles are, more often than not, valued simply to the extent that they can deliver on that promise. Such religion depends for its credibility and its survival on a cymbal-and-trumpet God who shatters the ordinary patterns of the world, perhaps in the form of an "incorruptible," a saint so holy that, in death, her body refuses to decay. Such religion relies on signs and wonders--or, in their absence, on the capacity to fabricate the illusion of one.
The contemporary purveyors of so-called "ID theory"--those who search through the annals of modern biology looking for some "irreducibly complex" organic structure that just can't be explained by the mechanisms described in evolutionary theory--are also, in their own way, placing their bets on this cymbal-and-trumpet God. And if they can't find their miraculous protein or organ, then there's always the Museum of Creation and Earth History to fabricate slick illusions.
What they all exemplify is one way to be religious, one way to conceive of what it means to believe in the divine. Hungry for miracles, they ignore the taste of chocolate and only shout the name of God when the chocolate drippings form a likeness of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Miracle-seekers embody a species of "God of the gaps" theology. But they don't just believe in the God of the gaps. Their eyes are glued to the gaps, committed to the reality of gaps, disappointed when gaps are closed, disillusioned if they cannot find enough gaps for God to fill. A miracle isn't a miracle unless it's a gap, unless it's an inexplicable violation of the order of nature.
I'm reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's admonition to those who "use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge." In Bonhoeffer's words, "We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved." To see the presence of God in something is to experience it as miraculous. And when we restrict our understanding of the miraculous to the inexplicable, we leave God out of the rest of our lives--the majority of our lives. God becomes caulking in the wall, rather than the home in which we live and breathe and have our being.
The poet and scholar Frederick Turner makes a similar point, in a Dallas Institute lecture, when he says, "It is easy to deceive ourselves that something strange, something supernatural, is happening, as we know well from accounts of flying saucer enthusiasts, superstitious cultists, and ghost hunters. But perhaps our greater danger, our greater credulity, lies in deceiving ourselves that something strange and marvelous is not happening."
We stare up at the star-littered sky, waiting for fireworks. And when the ephemeral sparks don't come, we hiss and walk away, disappointed and disillusioned under the ceaseless stars. Fixated on the extraordinary, the inexplicable, the gap, we cannot experience the miraculous in the seamless beauty of the world. Our quest for miracles shuts out the miraculous in an ordinary day, an indrawn breath, the smile on a beloved face.
The problem for those monks in "Incorruptible" isn't that their saint's bones have failed to perform a miracle in recent memory. Their problem, rather, is that the miracle of existence eludes them. Caught up in the trials of life, the pain and loss, the worry for the future, they have lost sight of being itself, the unutterable mystery of what we take to be routine, the unfathomable depths that lie beneath the problems that have been solved.
This is what Schleiermacher had in mind when he spoke about "the intuition of the infinite in the finite," or that constant, unrelenting inkling that existence as we know it has a "whence."
There is the religion that clings to the promise of extraordinary miracles--violations of nature's laws that we imagine vividly and long to see. And then there is the religion that arises out of the experience of the world all around, when its miraculous character rips through the humdrum of life, lifts us out of our skins, and grants us inklings of truth beyond imagining.
Or in the more poetic language of Kahlil Gibran,
…if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather, look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
"We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved."
ReplyDeleteThat's a funny one. What do we know on the topic? How do we know what god "wants"? Isn't that part of what we don't know? If it were all so apparent, your priests would be in a much better shape, either out of a job or knowing what they were doing.
If we focus on all the solved problems of the world, we are naturalists, quite simply. Not theists. The solved problems have all been solved in one way- without god/gods or supernaturalism of any kind.
Clearly the mysticism you are promoting has nothing to do with explaining anything in an analytically compelling way, but with re-framing the many mysteries and non-mysteries of existence through the rose-colored glasses of one religion, which may be psychologically compelling to some, but not philosophically compelling to anyone.
Burk,
ReplyDeleteYou get within striking distance of my point when you say the religion I'm endorsing "has nothing to do with explaining anything in an analytically compelling way, but with re-framing the many mysteries and non-mysteries of existence through the rose-colored glasses of one religion..." Specifically, you recognize that I am encouraging an approach to religious life in which religion functions, at least in part, as a "way of seeing" things. This, of course, is a point I've made before (for example, here and here), and about which you have commented.
But this notion of "ways of seeing" a whole appears to elude you when you insist, "If we focus on all the solved problems of the world, we are naturalists, quite simply. Not theists." Bonhoeffer's point is that we can consider what is known, all the solved problems, all the facts given to us by science, and see all of it AS the expression of divine creativity, or AS the product of blind mechanism and chance, etc. Whether we are theists or naturalists depends not on whether there are gaps in our understanding that cannot be filled by scientific explanations, but on how we SEE "all the solved problems of the world."
Unless, that is, you are the kind of theist for which "God exists" is not a religious claim but a pseudoscientific one. This, at the deepest level, is Bonhoeffer's point: believing in the "God of the gaps" is introducing God as a scientific hypothesis, rather than as the basis for a vision of life and way of life.
Two further quick points: First, there are different senses of "explanation," and different ways of explaining. In a sense, a "way of seeing" IS a way of explaining--or at least it can be. But it doesn't offer causal explanations. Rather, it gives a "what it's all about" explanation--that is, an account of meaning.
Second, a way of seeing can be motivated or unmotivated. In the case of religious ways of seeing, often they are motivated by distinctive experiences--call them mystical, if you will--which invite a certain way of seeing. The experience of reality AS miraculous is a kind of experience that people have and which invites the religious way of seeing. Part of my point in this post (and, I think Bonhoeffer's point as well) is that the habit of limiting one's sense of the miraculous to the "gap" is a habit that blocks or prevents this sort of experience.
Eric-
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I think that you somewhat misrepresent your position, because it is still full of gaps and pseudoscientific claims- the existence of supernatural planes, the mystical connection of human feelings with higher realities, the existence of heaven and perhaps hell, the existence of god, the dependence of the mind on non-physical, supernatural phenomena.. the list goes on, not even to touch on the more typical stories of scripture. This set of claims is far from a "frame", "way of seeing", or conferral of meaning that would be a mere perspective on the same world that we see otherwise with scientific lenses. It is quite another world.
Secondly, if one were to take your argument at face value and discard all gap-dependent claims and pseudoscience mumbo jumbo, what is left? How does a beloved doctrine distinguish itself from pink ponies and a love of Narnia? What makes the Christian story any better or more accurate than the scores of other religious and countless imaginative frames one might adopt? None, really.
You would then argue in rather utilitarian and aesthetic terms that those narratives that touch our hearts just so, and those that make us better people and make societies better places to live are "correct".
As usual, this seems a bad criterion. Psychological/sociological efficacy may be able to validate social and economic theories, but hardly cosmic ontologies, if my first point is correct. The Venn diagrams just don't coincide. More significantly, there is no end of empirical demonstration that religions are no better than any other social structuring method at determining what is "good", ending up as other systems do in a circular process of defining what is good by what is already deemed good, hopefully leavened by some humanism along the way, but often not.
So in the first place, a good deal more discipline is called for in your treatment of heaven, life after death, and so many other highly scientific issues if we are to take your definition of religion here seriously. And secondly, systems of meaning in human psychology are very dangerous affairs- necessary, yes, but also prone to terrible abuse. The safest approach is to enjoy the mystical in an unembroidered, naturalist way rather than interlacing it with pseudoscience. Perhaps if one is serious about a utilitarian approach, and willing to put up with a few pseudoscientific claims (though far less than Christianity's), we should all become buddhists.
Burk,
ReplyDeleteOnce again your comments are rooted in a misconstrual of my position rooted in only a partial picture of my overall philosophical position. I can only assume you didn't reread carefully the second of the links I offered in my last comment--in which I make clear that certain ways of seeing a subject matter posit or asssume something that is not part of the subject matter being "seen," something which must be posited in order for the subject matter to be "seen" in the given way.
Anyone who has read this blog or my book knows full well that the religion I endorse involves affirming that which transcends the world of ordinary experience--including a God who fulfills the ethico-religious hope, a hope that is not fulfilled (or clearly promised to be) by what we discern in the empirical realm.
What is at issue in this post is function that is being served by affirming such a thing. In "God of the gaps" theology, a transcendent reality is affirmed IN ORDER TO fill in an explanatory gap in the naturalistic explanation of the observable world--that is, in order to do the same sort of thing that science does. God thus becomes a quasi-scientific hypothesis in the sense of being an hypothesis introduced to do the same sort of work that scientific hypotheses are intended to do. In many if not most instances of such invocations of God, th "gap" that God is introduced to explain can eventually find a naturalistic explanation. In such cases, the invocation of God becomes pseudoscience.
But even if "God" sometimes IS the only explanation for a gap in our naturalistic account of the world (and I'm not saying I believe that this is so), God serving THAT function is very different from what I take to be God's RELIGIOUS function--and I think that fixation on God filling explanatory gaps tends to distract from BEING religious.
That is what I am worried about--and in raising these worries, my target audience is NOT the dogmatic atheist but the believer. I am writing this post to theists, which is probably one reason you are having such a hard time with it (because, to be candid, putting yourself into the perspective of someone whose beliefs are in a fundamental way unlike your own isn't one of your current strengths--although there's always hope for cultivating this ability with sincere practice).
My point is to say the following to those who invoke God to serve the function that scientific hypotheses are supposed to serve: You are reducing God to a (typically bad) scientific hypothesis. And in the process, you are losing sight of the essence of religious life, which involves seeing the whole of reality in a certain way. To see the whole of reality "theistically" clearly does involve affirming something that transcends the empirical realm, but that affirmation functions to enable a certain way of seeing the empirical realm that is given to us in our more ordinary and immediate experience. This is what I take to be the essence of a RELIGIOUS affirmation of God, as opposed to a pseudoscientific one.
And surely, after everything I've said about my Hegelian views, evidentialism, the problem of the criterion, etc., you can't honestly think that my epistemology is as naively simple as "If it makes me feel good, it must be true"?
This post simply isn't about those more epistemological issues. It is about distinguishing two discrete ways of seeing things as miraculous, and as such about two distinct way of invoking God in relation to one's experience of the world.
Apologies for all the missing words and typos in the last comment. Hope it's still understandable. I made the mistake of trying to sit down and write something while I was home with the kids, who interrupted me eighty thousand times and yanked on my arms and...yeah, I'd better get off my blog now and play with them...
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reply..
ReplyDelete"I can only assume you didn't reread carefully the second of the links I offered in my last comment--in which I make clear that certain ways of seeing a subject matter posit or asssume something that is not part of the subject matter being "seen," something which must be posited in order for the subject matter to be "seen" in the given way."
In brief, making things up, if only (charitably) for the sake of hypothesis.
I understand your focus on the religious function of your belief, yet it seems, nevertheless, to involve quite a load of pseudoscience which is exactly the kind of catnip/temptation that leads the less sophisticated listener into "belief" of your pseudoscientific propositions as though they served an explanatory function. You can't really have it both ways- positing pseudoscience and elaborate ontologies of reality purely for psychological reasons.. humans don't work that way. Such propositions are known as "fiction".
"And in the process, you are losing sight of the essence of religious life, which involves seeing the whole of reality in a certain way. To see the whole of reality "theistically" clearly does involve affirming something that transcends the empirical realm, but that affirmation functions to enable a certain way of seeing the empirical realm that is given to us in our more ordinary and immediate experience. This is what I take to be the essence of a RELIGIOUS affirmation of God, as opposed to a pseudoscientific one."
Again, you are trying to have it both ways, positing pseudoscience while taking it only metaphorically, psychologically, "religiously"... any way but straightforwardly as an ontology of reality, as it is put forth.
I would suggest that you consider Buddhism as a more humble method of doing what you say you aim for, proposing far less pseudoscience, sticking to this world and its suffering, and directly speaking to/engaging in the psychological cultivation you are interested in.
With regard to putting myself into the perspective of others, that is a virtue in relativistic matters, when the subjectivity of others is the paramount criterion. And surely that is often the case, such as in gay rights, morals, aesthetics, etc.. Perhaps it is also in a purely story- and pink-pony form of religion. But then all the pseudoscientific claims are put out, (though strenuously held to have nothing to do with "reality", only with "religion"...), and this virtue flies out the window, because truth and good philosophy are not matters of relativity. They are blanket claims over the reality that we all share, for better or for worse.
Taking on the perspective of others is then simply a tool to make sure one understands what others are saying as fully as possible, and testing their perspective for soundness. But if their argument opens with ".. knows full well that the religion I endorse involves affirming that which transcends the world of ordinary experience--including a God who fulfills the ethico-religious hope ..." , then the plausibility of that position already stands impaired and defunct.. further adoption of such a perspective is needless for those restricted, not even to the world of ordinary experience, but to the world of any kind of experience, rigorously and critically considered.
Eric
ReplyDeleteit's interesting to observe a slightly more gloves off than normal exchange between you and Burk, there's a certain clarity to it that is sometimes painted over with caution.
You say to Burk that surely it is obvious that your epistemology extends beyond "if it makes me feel good, it must be true." Although feel good is not the phrase I'd choose, there is something about that statement that does seem to fit your philosophy very well. You sincerely believe in a higher realm, and more importantly our access to it. You have expressed a faith that the Hegelian method will converge upon truth, and beneath this is a faith in the knowability of deeper truths, and all of this is presented within a pragmatist's framework.
None of this is to criticise your stance, indeed I admire it greatly, it strikes me as smart and consistent and I differ more in the leaps we make that the principles we invoke to get to the platform. What continues to interest me then, is an apparent reluctance to concede the necessary leaps into story telling, which we all must make all of the time. It seems to me that at this point peace might well break out between you and Burk, and I don't see quite what would be lost getting there.
Just a thought.
Bernard
Hi Eric,
ReplyDeleteIf I may add my bit here, it is sometimes difficult to figure out what you actually claim.
Are humans the result of “blind chance” or instead part of some “divine plan”? Either way, this states something about how reality actually is. One may say that, strictly speaking, both are compatible with what we know but they certainly describe very different realities.
Under the divine plan theory, either there is evidence for it (of any kind) or there isn't. If there is, and if we're interested in finding the truth, we should study it with all we've got in order to determine how reliable it is. And, if there isn't, in what sense would the idea be anything else than a purely human invention?
Now, as far as I know, theists are not coming up with anything like convincing evidence. I understand: this is not what they're trying to do – this is all about “ways of saying”. This is fine, as far as it goes. But then, why not simply stop claiming that reality is this way or that way? Why not concede that claims about the existence of God are not claims about reality?
You seem to go almost that far. You write that “God exists” is a religious claim and not something else. Is this your meaning, then, that this is not at all a claim about how reality is or isn't?
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteResponding to Eric you write: “You say to Burk that surely it is obvious that your epistemology extends beyond "if it makes me feel good, it must be true." Although feel good is not the phrase I'd choose, there is something about that statement that does seem to fit your philosophy very well.”
I tend to agree. Indeed I think that in many ways “if it makes me feel good, it must be true” is an appropriate epistemic principle. If theism is true and reality is fundamentally good, then that principle is a direct implication, at least for a sufficiently strong sense of “feel good”. Surely a good God would not create the world in such a way that we would feel good with false ideas. So if you are a theist you are actually committed to this principle. Therefore for a theist to not embrace “if it makes me feel good, it must be true” is ultimately an incoherent position.
But let us consider that principle from the agnostic point of view, i.e. from outside a theistic commitment. Take the syllogism “Drinking water when thirsty consistently makes me feel good, therefore water exists”. Or: “Moving to the next room by walking through the wall instead of through the door feels painful and like a failure, therefore both the door and the wall exist”. Such syllogisms strike me as eminently reasonable, whatever one’s ontological assumptions may be. I think we all use “truth” in the pragmatical sense. Philosophers have suggested other senses of “truth”, in particular the so-called correspondence theory of truth, that is the idea that something is true if it corresponds to how reality is. Only, it seems to me, the correspondence theory of truth is a pragmatical theory of truth in disguise, for the only way to find out whether in fact an idea corresponds to reality is pragmatically. Another theory, the so-called coherence theory is also it seems to me a pragmatical theory in disguise, for it depends on how we dislike incoherent ideas and on how we tend to pragmatically find out that incoherent ideas do not pan out in reality.
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ReplyDeleteIn any case, to hold that “something is true if it pragmatically works” is an eminently reasonable stance. Suppose now somebody finds that theism makes excellent sense of her experience of life (both in the so-called public and private aspects of it). Suppose further that she finds that the theistic worldview changes the way she experiences life for the better, and in particular makes her experience of everything more beautiful. Suppose further that she finds that the theistic worldview gives her moral strength, and thus helps her be the person she would like to be. Suppose further that when considering the alternative mechanistic worldview of naturalism, she finds it makes no sense at all, is full of conceptual problems, and that the very idea of it fills her with life-deadening anguish. Suppose further that all of the above work consistently and fruitfully in her life, up to the point that her experience is transformed in such a way that the presence of God becomes a consistent and joyful experiential reality, the way, say, the love of her husband is, or the beauty of music is. Given such an experience of life it would be utterly irrational for that person not to be a theist, or not to believe in the existence of God, or to believe that all that exists is matter evolving in a blindly mechanical fashion. Suppose now somebody tells her that she is making up a feel-good story. Do you think that would make any impression to her? You might as well tell somebody who has just drunk water to quench her thirst, that she is making up a feel-good story about the existence of water.
The above paragraph may be misleading though, in the sense that it gives the impression that the religious worldview comes first and then the religious life. As a matter of fact it’s the other way around. In short, there is a structure in the dynamics of the human condition (which the above paragraph touches upon), namely a dialectic between how one is on the one hand, and how one experiences life and how one chooses to live on the other. That structure is as consistent and significant, and thus as real as any order present in the physical phenomena (which themselves form but a part of the human condition). Now, religion has many sources including our response both to the order and the mayhem of physical phenomena, the need for a society-wide common ground of rules and ceremonial bonding, etc. The fundamental source and foundation of religion though is our thousands of years old response to that deep structure of the human condition. Given that structure of our condition only a religious way of life makes sense, which in turn pushes for a religious worldview. The belief system that comes with religion is then a final implication and not its initial reason of being.
There is the way, and then comes the description of the way and of the country on which it lies. Further, the description of it helps some people find their way. In any case the description is secondary, what’s real is the way. The difference is huge. Indeed, as far as I can see, some respond appropriately to that structure of the dynamics of the human condition *without* committing themselves to a religious description of the country on which they are walking. These are the self-realized and loving non-religious people. Which is quite fine, and indeed quite admirable. On the other hand, many people who are religious only in name do the opposite. Ultimately, religious belief or non-belief is not the significant thing. The significant thing is to follow the way of internal growth and self-transcendence that is open in the reality of the human condition. At its best, religious belief is a fitting description of that way and of the reality in which it exists, and also an effective and fruitful motivator. As Jesus in Gospels says, from its fruit you’ll recognize the truth.
JP,
ReplyDeletePlease consider the following text, which is almost identical to what you wrote, and please explain if you see anything wrong with it:
Are humans the result of “blind chance” or instead part of some “divine plan”? Either way, this states something about how reality actually is. One may say that, strictly speaking, both are compatible with what we know but they certainly describe very different realities. Under the blind chance theory, either there is evidence for it (of any kind) or there isn't. If there is, and if we're interested in finding the truth, we should study it with all we've got in order to determine how reliable it is. And, if there isn't, in what sense would the idea be anything else than a purely human invention? Now, as far as I know, naturalists are not coming up with anything like convincing evidence.
See my point? Now the naturalist may reasonably claim that even if there is no actual evidence it certainly looks like we are the result of “blind chance”. But is she justified in claiming that? I mean there really are huge problems with that idea. On the one hand there is the strictly scientific question. We understand the Darwinian algorithm pretty well, we know that it will not necessary result in an increase of complexity, and we simply *don’t* know the probability of organisms as complex as we are evolving by blind chance, given the state of the Earth after life started on it and given the physical laws of the universe. To put it plainly naturalists only *assume* that this probability is large, and sell their metaphysical assumption as if it were based on the science of evolution. Further, there are deep metaphysical questions, such as 1) the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental physical constants for life (how “blind chance” can that be?), 2) the deep mathematical nature of the physical laws (how "blind chance" can that be?), and 3) the extremely serious and relevant question of why or how a blind chance physical evolution should produce conscious beings as we are. (2) is particularly problematic for Darwinism does not requiere it and therefore the anthropic principle does not apply and the multiverse hypothesis fails. In conclusion it seems to me that the naturalistic idea that it looks like we are the product of blind chance is really make-believe. If one really considers all the evidence it does *not* look like it.
Finally, what goes for the goose goes for the gander. So, if the naturalist, beyond the actual evidence, may call upon her sense of how things look like, the theist too may argue that it all looks to her like the result of a define plan.
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ReplyDeleteNow I completely agree with you that there must be a fact of the matter. We (and everything else) is either the result of blind chance or ultimately of a divine plan. Or, to be more precise, not both hypotheses about reality can be true. The real question then is how to find out. The scientific evidence appears to be entirely lacking one way or the other. We may use metaphysical or philosophical argumentation. Eric and many other academic philosophers such as Plantinga think that such arguments are ultimately inconclusive too. I beg to disagree, for I think that if one consistently uses the same (non question begging) epistemic principles on both theism and naturalism one will discover that theism works consistently better. There is also the alternative of Hegel’s method which Eric has been proposing, namely the idea of trying out in one’s own life, and more clearly in communal life, various worldviews and realize which lead to incoherence and which lead to success.
Whatever our disagreements may be, there are a few points I would like to posit as being factual: The idea that the success of the physical sciences is best explained by naturalism, or even that this success requires the truth of naturalism, is completely bogus and represents only a dominant myth of our times. The discoveries of modern science have, if anything, created serious conceptual problems for naturalism. Leaving the physical sciences out of it, one finds that there is a growing number of philosophical arguments for theism and an almost complete lack of philosophical arguments for naturalism (can you mention just one?). There are also many statistical studies which show that (other factors being the same) religious people have on average a better life and are more giving (even though there is some question about the direction of the causal link). In conclusion I claim that by any objective measure there is a clear epistemic advantage for religion in comparison to naturalism.