What Do Religious Claims Mean?

First of all, let me apologize for neglecting this blog for close to a week. This neglect is in part due to prioritizing time with my family over the Labor Day weekend, and in part due to my energies being directed towards something I hope to make an official announcement about by week's end.

That said, let's turn to something more philosophically substantive. There is an interesting connection between the topic of my philosophy of religion discussion this past Friday--namely, Anthony Flew's famous argument challenging the meaningfulness of religious claims (most notably the claim that God exists)--and the most recent installment in the New York Times philosophy forum, The Stone.

In Sunday's "Stone" installment, the atheist philosopher Tim Crane attempts to provide an honest account of what religion is about and why treating it as so many atheists do--as if its propositions were hypotheses capable of scientific testing--is inappropriate. Now let me begin by saying that my own perspective on these matters differs in important ways from Crane's. But I think he is asking the right questions. And I think he is pointing out some differences between science and religion that need to be taken seriously if we want to understand why, for example, Flew's argument falls flat among so many religious believers.

Of course, in some cases Flew's argument falls flat because the religious believers aren't listening, or they don't care about arguments. But many religious believers do care about arguments and have both listened to and understood Flew's case against the meaningfulness of certain kinds of religious claims--and yet they are unconvinced. The question is why.

Flew directs his argument towards untestable religious claims, claims that are consistent with any empirical observation we might possibly make. He summarizes his case against these religious claims as follows:

Some theological utterances seem to, and are intended to, provide explanations or express assertions. Now an assertion, to be an assertion at all, must claim that things stand thus and thus; and not otherwise. Similarly an explanation, to be an explanation at all, must explain why this particular thing occurs; and not something else... And yet sophisticated religious people...tend to refuse to allow, not merely that anything actually does occur, but that anything conceivably could occur which would count against their theological assertions and explanations. But in so far as they do this their supposed explanations are bogus, and their seeming assertions are vacuous.

The challenge that Flew lays down is specifically directed towards "sophisticated" religious people--those who care about science and its teachings, who care about facts, and who endeavor therefore to offer an account of their faith that is consistent with the facts as we know them. When new scientific discoveries challenge this account of their faith, sophisticated religious people neither reject the facts nor conclude "I guess there is no God after all" or something along those lines. Instead, they revise their account.

But if it really is possible to continually revise the faith to accomodate new facts, doesn't it follow that the underlying core beliefs--such as belief in something transcendent--are consistent with any set of facts we might discover? And if so, doesn't it therefore follow that these underlying precepts aren't saying anything substantive?

Rather than repeat what I say about this in my book, let me address this line of thought the way I do in a forthcoming article (following John Hick's lead), by invoking the famed "duck-rabbit" image:

The point I make in the article is that religious claims, instead of being primarily about what the (directly or indirectly) observable facts are, offer instead a way of seeing the totality of facts--what I call an "interpretive worldview." How does this relate to the above image? Well, with respect to the image above, we can offer descriptions of what is in front of us--for example, that there are two protrusions coming out of the left side of the image that comprise roughly half the width of the entire image at its widest point. In other words, we can describe details accurately or inaccurately in propositions which are therefore either true or false.

But we can also do something else. We can see the image as a rabbit or as a duck. Now there are certain "ways of seeing" that are precluded by the details of the image. For example, I'd be hard pressed to see the image above as a football player attacking a penguin using a wet piece of styrofoam. The details of the image are ambiguous enough to allow alternative ways of seeing--but some ways of seeing are, to put it simply, rather nutty.

The thing to notice about seeing this image as a duck or as a rabbit is this: whether we see it as one or the other does not have implications for what is there in the image to be described. It does, however, have implications for how we interpret the various elements of the image. The protrusions on the left are interpreted as ears or as a beak. The little knob on the right is either a random bump or a nose. In other words, how we see it has implications for the significance that we attach to the various components of the image. But it's the same whole that is being interpreted in different ways. To see it as a rabbit is not to assert that there is some descriptive detail there in the image that someone who sees it as a duck is asserting isn't there.

This is how interpretive worldviews operate in relation to the world we encounter in experience taken as a whole. They offer alternative "ways of seeing" this whole--ways which might postulate this whole as part of a larger whole that lends to it a significance it wouldn't have on its own (one way of understanding what supernaturalism is), or ways which sees the empirical world as the totality of what there is but may still see it in different ways.

R.M Hare, in his response to Flew (at the original panel discussion in which Flew's argument was first presented), is making essentially the same point I'm gesturing towards with the duck-rabbit image when he says that religious beliefs offer what he calls a "blik." A blik is a way of seeing the whole, rather than a claim about the specific details of the whole. Some bliks are sane and some are insane (Hare uses the example of someone who thinks that all English dons are engaged in a vast and brilliant secret conspiracy to bring him to ruin). Whether a blik is sane or not depends on its "fit" with what is being interpreted in its light. And since there is such a thing as a good fit or a bad fit, there are standards (however hard they may be to articulate and apply) for assessing bliks. But the question is whether these standards, when applied to the vast and astonishingly complex universe in which we reside, allow only one blik (a naturalistic one, or a Christian one, or a Buddhist one), or allow several.

One of the difficulties here is that, once you are used to seeing things a certain way, it can be very hard to imagine it any other way--even IF some other way is at least as good a fit as your way of seeing. I think this is particularly true when it comes to interpretive worldviews, which attempt to offer a holistic way of seeing everything that is a part of our lived experience--the physical world encountered through the senses, morality, aesthetics, consciousness, etc.

Of course, as the details of this whole become more clear, some bliks may cease to "fit." Perhaps, one day, if we ever got there, the image would be so clear that all ambiguity would evaporate and there would be only one "way of seeing" the whole universe that fits. But I doubt it, and we'll never get there in any event.

Be that as it may, it should be clear that there is a big difference between the project of clarifying the details of the picture and the task of offering and/or refining a way of seeing it. While the former is meaningful to the extent that it describes (accurately or inaccurately) various parts of the picture--and so says that things "stand thus and thus and not otherwise"--the latter gets its meaning in a different way. In effect, a "blik" makes a difference for how we treat what is observed, how we relate to it, what is appropriate in response to it--in short, a blik makes a difference on a more pragmatic (or moral) level.