Conspiracy Theories and the Faith of Martin Luther King

I've always found conspiracy theories--and the motivations behind them--both interesting and disturbing. They strike me as offering stark support for G. K. Chesterton's assessment of insanity: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." There is a sinister consistency to conspiracy theories. But there is no whiff of common sense.

My interest in conspiracy theories is heightened by the fact that what I find wrong with them--my assessment, if you will, of why they are insane--bears a striking resemblance to what many atheist critics of religion find wrong with religious faith. Of course one can't deny that some religious belief-systems have the character of conspiracy theories (I think of Pat Robertson's troubling accounts of such things as why Haiti was struck by such a terrible earthquake a few years back). When religious beliefs take on the characte of cosmic conspiracy theories, I think it fitting to call them insane.

But I think the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr.--whose life and work we celebrated yesterday--exposes the error of the sweeping generalization. I think there were few people of the 20th Century more sane than Martin Luther King, Jr. And I think that his faith in a God of love and justice was one of the things that helped to keep him sane as he struggled to change an insane system.

I started thinking about conspiracy theories last week, when a YouTube video purportedly exposing evidence of a Sandy Hook conspiracy went viral. Those who reposted it on social media often accompanied the post with comments like, “I’m not sure what to think of this, but it’s important to think about” (to which the proper answer is “No, it’s not”).

The viral video is one popular example of an emerging Sandy-Hook-conspiracy genre. These conspiracy theories are, of course, insulting to the victims of the tragedy, to the officials who have attempted to respond, and to the American people. They are also entirely predictable and completely standard conspiracy-theory fare. In the face of national tragedies, conspiracy theorists use vague and scattered bits of data to plant the idea that the tragedy (in this case the Sandy Hook shootings) is really a government-orchestrated plot aimed at facilitating a government agenda (in this case gun control legislation). A few years back we saw a similar conspiracy theory grow up around the 9-11 attacks. In that case, it was a supposed neo-con conspiracy aimed at gaining public support for aggressive military engagement in the Middle East.

These conspiracy theories portray the government as not only secretive and manipulative, but as morally depraved: the killing of innocent school children, or of thousands of people in the Twin Towers and Pentagon, is suggestively blamed on the highest officials of government, presumably for the sake of consolidating power.

Conspiracy theorists connect the dots like ancient star-gazers constructing celestial representations of their gods. To see Orion in the sky, you don’t just have to connect the stars in a very particular way (rather than in any of a countless range of alternative ways), but you then need to fill in the empty spaces with details that aren’t there to be seen. Or, to shift metaphors, you turn isolated facts, easily explained on their own terms, into the proverbial tip of a purported iceberg.

Again, Chesterton's analysis of lunatics is instructive. The madman "sees too much cause in everything," so that a passerby's casual act of slashing at the grass with a stick becomes "an attack on private property." Kicking of the heels becomes "a signal to an accomplice." Nothing is random but is instead swept up into a singular narrative:

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. 

It's probably best not to treat Chesterton's comments here as an attempt to get at the essence of all mental illness--I'm sure a psychologist could pick out numerous disorders in the DSM that don't fit Chesterton's paradigm. But as an analysis of one common sort of madness, it seems quite apt. And it's an especially good fit with what is going on in conspiracy theories.

The point is this: the conspiracy theorist invests a smattering of apparently random facts and stray coincidences with portentous meaning, a meaning given those facts by their connection to an underlying story of what is going on for which no substantive evidence is available. The conspiracy narrative also builds in resources for explaining why the evidence is so scant and ambiguous, and for answering the range of objections that are likely to arise. A good conspiracy theory, in the manner of a satisfying mystery novel, weaves together seemingly disconnected facts to reveal a hidden "truth" that is both surprising and coherent. But to be received as more than just a pleasing fiction, it also needs to play into the presuppositions, ideologies, and fears of the target audience.

And when a conspiracy theory succeeds in doing this, the result can often be a rather hermetically sealed account, essentially immune to falsification. Those of us who shake our heads might raise objections or point out contrary evidence all day long (such as what this comprehensive Salon article tries to do in response to the Sandy Hook conspiracies), but with little effect on the true believer.
Of course, many consipracy theories do rely on purported facts that are demonstrably false. But the best conspiracy theories avoid blatant falsehoods rather effectively. They also, however, avoid such things as Ockham’s Razor. They pay no attention to elegance and simplicity of explanation.

Standard conspiracy theories like those proliferating around the Sandy Hook tragedy are weighted down with unsubstantiated assertions that only seem plausible from within the conspiracy narrative (in other words, it’s only once you buy the whole picture that any of the individual claims becomes remotely credible). And the facts to be accounted for by this clunky mess of unsubstantiated claims could easily be explained in other ways, ways that don’t require such runaway and presumptively unlikely speculation (as the Salon article so nicely shows).
To accept such conspiracy theories, we may not have to defy the laws of reason. But we do have to lose touch with something a little bit harder to characterize in a logic textbook--something that Chesterton calls our "good judgment."

But precisely because "good judgment" is a concept harder to characterize than the laws of logic, the charge that one has lost touch with it is easier to level. And it's harder to refute.

In fact, everything I have just said about conspiracy theories has been said, more than once, by atheists critics of religious belief in general. If we set aside the hyperbole and ridicule and philosophical blundering that characterizes so much of the New Atheist’s writings, it might well be that what remains is a criticism of religious belief along these lines:

Religion offers a compelling narrative that plays into our emotions and weaves together a scattering of disparate facts, attaching to them a significance they would not otherwise have—a significance given to them by the unsubstantiated claims about a supernatural realm whose existence is a matter of mere speculation. In this respect, religious belief is exactly like a conspiracy theory—and just as no sensible person should take the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories seriously, neither should they take seriously religious doctrines.

Is there a way to answer this objection--without lending carte blanche legitimacy to conspiracy theories?

I think so. The charge gets its traction from the fact that there is something that religious beliefs and conspiracy theories have in common. They both go beyond the available evidence to affirm a narrative picture that affords one with a distinctive way of seeing the accessible facts--a way that is different from how one might otherwise see them. But just because dogs and cats are both mammals, it doesn't follow that all cats are dogs. And it certainly doesn't follow that you should refuse to own a cat because dogs often bark too much for your taste.

One way to understand what conspiracy theories have in common with religious beliefs is to see them both as "bliks"--a term coined by R. M Hare in his response to Anthony Flew's famous argument in "Theology and Falsification." Flew worries that many religious beliefs have been qualified into meaninglessness in the effort to render them compatible with the empirical facts we know. The belief that there is a God is made so abstract that it no longer has any implications for how the world might look. And this means, according to Flew, that the belief no longer says anything about the world. It no longer says, "Things stand thus and not otherwise." Thus stripped of any descriptive content, the religious "belief" becomes meaningless. There is no longer anything that you are believing to be true.

Hare responds by attempting to show how something can be meaningful even if it is unfalsifiable, even if it can be rendered consistent with any conceivable observation. His strategy is to identify a distinctive species of belief that isn't so much a belief about what is available to be observed but, instead, is a way of seeing what is observed. He calls such a thing a "blik." And his primary example of a blik is the outlook of a madman who thinks that all English dons are out to get him, and who explains away their apparently benign behavior as a sign of their cleverness. In other words, Hare's main example of a blik is nothing other than a conspiracy theory.

But even if every conspiracy theory is a blik, it doesn't follow that every blik is a conspiracy theory. In fact, it becomes clear from Hare's analysis that he does not want to say the latter.

Hare's aim is to show how a perspective can be meaningful even if it isn't falsifiable. He uses the madman's conspiracy theory about dons to do just this. Even if the madman's perspective can be rendered compatible with any conceivable observation, it remains a distinctive perspective rather unlike the one that most people have towards English dons. The difference is made manifest by the fact that the madman behaves very differently towards--and has very different emotional responses to--the English dons around him. This alone goes to show that "All English dons are out to get me" means something different from "Most English dons don't know that I exist and those that do don't spend much time thinking about me," even if they map onto the very same set of observable facts. They have very different pragmatic implications.


But notice: if these two perspectives map onto the very same set of observable facts, then the observable facts don't specify one or the other. Instead, both are bliks--competing ways of seeing those facts. And only one of them is a lunatic's conspiracy theory. In other words, for every conspiracy-theory blik, there's a sensible alternative.

In short, all of us have bliks. For Hare, the important question is whether your blik is sane or not. Unfortunately, while Hare thinks bliks can be classified as sane or insane, he doesn't offer a mechanism for deciding the matter. Presumably, he took that task to exceed the scope of what could be done in a symposium paper.

Likewise, I suspect it is beyond the scope of what can be done in a blog post. What I can do, however, is offer an example of a religious way of seeing that, it seems to me, is rather obviously different from a typical conspiracy-theory blik: the religious vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. I have some thoughts about what makes it different--and what makes it a sane way of seeing things as opposed to an insane one. But instead of making this blog post into a book, I will do that teacher's trick and ask my readers their thoughts: How is King's religious vision relevantly different from a conspiracy theory?
What I will do, to help you address this question, is offer an overview of King's religious vision--a distinctive understanding of the Christian faith powerfully shaped by his exposure, as a young theology student, to the Boston "personalists."

In contrast to contemporary materialists, who take inanimate matter and energy to be the basic mataphysical reality, King (following the personalists) took "personality" to be the basic metaphysical reality--and he defined personality as "self-consciousness and self-direction." In other words, mind and  agency, subjectivity and will.

Put another way, instead of explaining minds by reference to matter (a view he once described as "sheer magic"), King was inclined to explain matter by reference to mind. Instead of explaining away the actions of persons as the by-product of blind mechanism, he was inclined to explain mechanistic processes as having their ultimate root in a divine will. Thus, King was led to favorably quote the physicist Sir James Jeans, who said that "the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine."

More significantly, in seeing the physical world as arising out of a fundamental reality that has more in common with persons than with electrons, King saw the persons in the world as having "cosmic companionship" in their journeys through life. He believed that the "the universe bends towards justice" because the personality at the root of creation--the being King understood in light of the Christian conception of God--is characterized most essentially by love.

King stressed that to call God "personal" as King did "is not to make him an object among other objects or attribute to him the finiteness and limitations of human personality." King apparently saw God as that in which objects in the universe have their being, as opposed to seeing God as another being one might encounter in the universe. And he saw God's personality as the perfect and unlimited expression of "what is finest and noblest in our consciousness."

This personalism makes human beings the clearest reflection of the most fundamental reality, and hence possessed of a dignity and worth beyond measure. King thus routinely invoked his theistic personalism as a basis for the moral condemnation of policies and institutions that diminished any person. And a person was diminished if either of the two defining features of personality are undervalued or ignored or repressed. If your experience doesn't count or doesn't matter; if your freedom to act in self-directed ways is arbitrarily restricted; then a blow has been struct against that which is most fundamental in the universe.

Just as importantly, the immeasurable worth of persons was a chief philosophical basis for his commitment to nonviolence as a method of social change. No person was without value, no matter how horrific their behavior. Thus, it was policies and practices that must be opposed--because they diminished persons--not the persons who advanced those policies and practices. Nonviolence was the clearest way to make this distinction, to challenge the evil done while continuing to lift up and affirm the worth of the evil-doer as a person. For King, the nonviolent ethic of agape he endorsed showed respect for that of God in all persons, while expressing that of God within ourselves--namely what is finest and noblest in our own consciousness: our capacity for love.

There were times in his life when he almost abandoned his leadership role in the civil rights movement--but persevered because of the subjectively felt presence of this God of love, this "benign power" at the root of creation Who, in moments of prayer, became "profoundly real" to him, washing away fear with "an inner voice saying, 'Lo, I will be with you.'"

There is more that can be said about King's religious worldview, but this should be sufficient to see that it had profound practical implications for how he lived his life, how he assessed segregation, and how he responded to it. It was a way of seeing the world in direct contrast with certain other ways of seeing--such as the materialistic one he most explicitly defined himself against.

If a life is a measure of a man's sanity, I would say King was eminently sane. And given how integral his worldview was to that life, it would be incredible to suggest that this worldview amounted to an insane blik unless we want to call King a madman. But anyone who's life is as defined by a conspiracy theory as King's life was defined by his Christian faith surely would be judged mad.

So what, if anything, is it about King's faith that keeps it from being lumped with the class of insane bliks to which conspiracy theories belong?

My "Philosophy of Religion" in Outline

As I was getting ready to reply to several comments on my earlier post, Monks, Miracles, and the God of the Gaps, it seemed to me that the comments I was starting to write were really aimed at fitting together the pieces of my overall "philosophy of religion." And that task seemed more suited to a blog post than to a set of comments. And so I decided that I really should offer a post which affords such an overview--one that doesn't systematically defend every piece, but instead seeks to show how the pieces fit together, to show how the ideas developed in various places on this blog and in Is God a Delusion? are related to each other.

Obviously, not every aspect of my thinking on religion is going to appear in such a sketch. What I want to highlight here are the "themes" that are most helpful (I hope) in giving a big picture summary of my philosophy. Things which I don't explicitly discuss here, but which are clearly significant to me (religious experience, the nature of consciousness, etc.), should not be considered less important to me just because I don't address them explicitly here. I'm pretty sure that readers can readily see how and where these other topic fit into the broad scheme I'm offering. At the end of this overview, I offer "further readings" suggestions, directing those interested to places where I develop these themes in greater detail.

Here, then, is my attempt to summarize and coordinate several key dimensions of my overall "philosophy of religion":


1. I take a religious worldview, insofar as it is religious, to offer a framework for a "way of seeing" the whole of experience. A way of seeing attaches a certain meaning and significance to what is experienced. It weaves the features of experience together in a certain way, and attaches a meaning to the elements of experience and to one's life as a whole. It also has implications for how one should respond to the world--both in terms of actions and in terms of attitudes. Insofar as a religious worldview is a way of seeing, it must "fit" with experience in some broad sense. Not every "ways of seeing" is coherent given the actual content it is trying to invest with meaning (we can coherently see the duck-rabbit as a duck, or as a rabbit, but not as ballerina dancing atop a monster truck).

2. Many ways of seeing involve positing things about reality that are not themselves part of the field of experience. Generally, religious ways of seeing--especially theistic ones--are like this. They make claims about a transcendent reality that make possible a distinctive way of seeing. To see reality theistically requires, in effect, that one affirm that the empirical world of our experience is the outpouring of a transcendent conscious agency. In Is God a Delusion?, I thus describe religious beliefs as "meaning-bestowing beliefs about the transcendent."

3. Sometimes a way of seeing is chosen out of a kind of moral hope. Of the possible ways of seeing experience, one in particular may strike us as the most optimistic, the most expressive of our moral sense of what is good. Put another way, we embrace one way of seeing among a field of alternatives because, given our understanding of what is good, we judge that it would be good if this were what it all means. In Is God a Delusion?, this is what I have in mind when I talk about "the ethico-religious hope," and I define faith in terms of this hope. To be precise, faith in this sense means choosing to live as if this hoped-for possibility is true.

Conceived thus, faith is not knowledge and does not imply knowledge or certainty or any such thing. To embrace a particular way of seeing "out of faith" is not to claim to have special grounds for belief that make one's way of seeing more likely to be true than the others that "fit" with the field of experience. To believe on faith, in this sense, is thus NOT the same as claiming that "it's lovely so it must be true." To claim that would be to claim that the loveliness of a worldview is proof of its truth--which is a clearly dubious epistemic assumption (although, as a postulate worth testing, it may be worth considering the more modest idea that the moral attractiveness of a worldview has evidentiary signficance--a point I get to in #6).

Nor is faith nothing but wishful thinking. Better to call it hopeful living--since it is about living as if a hoped-for possibility is true. But if so, it is hopeful living regulated by evidentiary constraints. Unlike mere wishing, it must meet the constraint of what "fits" with the field of experience. It must be a hopeful possibility.

4. The pursuit of knowledge, when it comes to that which transcends the empirical--when it comes to what Kant calls the "noumenal" reality (things as they are in themselves) behind the "phenomenal" realm (things as they are for us, or as they appear to us)--cannot proceed in the way that we pursue knoweldge of phenomena. Knowledge of phenomena cannot be pursued in advance of adopting a certain way of seeing. While some ways of seeing appear to be common to humanity, and form the basis for a common experience of the world and public claims of empirical knowledge, this common foundation can fit within a variety of broader, more holistic ways of seeing.

When deciding among these broader ways of seeing and the claims about the transcendent/noumenal that they presuppose, either no knowledge is possible (Kant's view) or we must rely on an approach very different from the one that guides the acquisition of empirical knowledge (such as, for example, the approach endorsed by Hegel). Each of these options warrants independent consideration.

5. If we go with Kant's view, then holistic ways of seeing--including, I should add, naturalistic ones--all fall into the same category: they are unknowable speculation, and if there are any reasons for us to choose among them, the reasons will be more practical/pragmatic/moral than "evidential." At least sometimes it is practically impossible to operate from a position of neutrality, to fail to take a stand with respect to one way of seeing or another. With respect to speculations about human agency, we either have to operate as if we are free, or not. With respect to the origins of the cosmos, we have to decide whether to adopt a stance of gratitude--the kind of stance that makes sense if reality is the product of loving agency. At least sometimes, elements of one's personal history make a position of indifference, of neutrality among ways of seeing, inconceivable.

The point is this: many of us confront an existential choice that we cannot ignore indefinitely--and so we have to decide on what basis to make that choice. If Kant is right, then deciding on the basis of moral hope--that is, a hope shaped by one's conception of the good--seems as good a basis as any, if not a better one. Kant himself invokes morality as providing the decision-making standard by which "postulates" about the noumenal are made. In other words, he thinks that given the inability to have "speculative knowledge," we nevertheless can and should embrace those beliefs about the transcendent that make our moral lives coherent--that offer, in my terms, a "way of seeing" the world in which moral norms are meaningful and moral life is possible. But as soon as this kind of hope is allowed in as a basis for decision-making, we need to consider another possibility, one which speaks to what might be called an epistemic hope: namely, the hope that Kant is wrong, that there is a way to move towards seeing the truth when it comes to ways of seeing.

6. And so we come to Hegel, who describes a mechanism whereby holistic worldviews can (and do) evolve against the testing ground of human life. On this Hegelian view, a worldview lived out as a matter of moral hope--while not thereby a matter of knowledge--might (like all other worldviews adopted for other reasons) evolve progressively in the light of "contradictions" or experienced deficiencies that emerge as that worldview is lived out (especially insofar as it is lived out communally). The idea--perhaps the hope?--is that noumenal reality, even if it transcends our understanding, nevertheless is the substance of both us and our world, and so impacts the tenability of certain lived-out worldviews. We just won't succeed forever in living as if the world in which we live is fundamentally unlike the way it really is. And so, whatever the origins of one's "way of seeing," lived experience becomes its testing ground, the venue in which decisions made in hope are refined, ideas embraced on the basis of faith are adjusted or even, potentially, overturned.

And the Hegelian evolution of faith-based worldviews offers the opportunity to test experimentally a notion that we cannot just dogmatically assume, but which we cannot simply dismiss out of hand either--namely, the notion that goodness and beauty are in some fundamental way related to truth.

In a way, this is what I take to be what distinguishes evolving religious traditions from other evolving (nonreligious) worldviews: They adopt, as part of the operative presuppositions which are being experimentally lived out, the presumption that beauty and goodness are not mere epiphenomena, not merely the subjective projections of a consciousness that is itself nothing more than the by-product of blind matter and energy, mechanism and chance; they are, rather, clues about the ultimate nature of reality. That something is in tune with our deepest, most stable, and pervasive value intuitions is thus treated as having evidentiary significance (albeit not overriding significance) in the formation of our beliefs.

The Hegelian religious project, then, becomes the long-term, evolving effort to critically live out, in Hermann Lotze's language, "the conviction that what is so fair and full of significance cannot be an accidental product of that which is without significance, but must be either the very Principle of the world or closely related to its creative principle." In short, the act of faith--the decision to live as if the fulfillment of one's moral hopes is real--establishes a framework from which the pursuit of transcendent knoweldge is sought through a plodding, historic process of pragmatic refinement. And it is a framework whose central postulate lends defeasible evidentiary significance to our moral (and aesthetic?) intutitions.

From a Hegelian standpoint, when it comes to such postulates "the proof is in the pudding." Unfortunately for all of us, this is a pudding we're cooking intergenerationally, and none of us will be alive to see the finished product. In the microcosm of our own lives, Kant may be right about the inaccessibility of the noumena. Moral hope may be all we have to go on. But that shouldn't keep us from taking part in the evolving social project that promises to discipline our speculative hopes with the pragmatic implications of living them out.   
__________________________________________________________
For more on #1, see especially here and here

For more on #2, see especially Is God a Delusion? (IGAD) Ch 5

For more on #3, see especially IGAD Ch's 8 & 9

For more on #'s 4 & 5, see especially my series of posts on characterizing naturalism.

For more on #6, see my recent posts on Hegel.

A Case Study in Ways of Seeing: Reading Texts

Some of the comments on my previous post called to my attention something I probably wouldn’t have noticed were it not for the substance of the post itself. Specifically, the act of interpreting a “text” (by which I mean to include not only written ideas but spoken ones) is perhaps one of the more familiar cases of the phenomenon I was attempting to characterize in the last post. One’s “reading” of a text is a way of seeing it. And people can agree about what words are on a page and yet disagree about how best to “read” them—about what significance to attribute to the whole message. These disagreements are meaningful even if all agree on what words are on the page (or in the post, etc.).

In any event, I couldn't resist the urge to elaborate on this idea of "ways of seeing" and its relation to "the facts" by using my previous post and different ways of seeing it as an example (since that kind of meta-level self-referential stuff just makes me happy).

Bernard and Burk and Darrell all “saw” my last post (about ways of seeing) differently—and, as is inevitably the case in human communication, all three ways of seeing differed from one another. Bernard "saw" the post (through the lens of Karl Popper) as way of understanding religion that made it hardly at odds with atheism at all; Burk saw it as an extension of the very thing Flew was critiquing—an attempt to avoid taking a stand on a claim of divine existence unsupported by any evidence; Darrell saw it as highlighting the fact that all of us inevitably bring a broader story to our experience, in the light of which we impart meaning and significance to “the facts” of experience.

Again as is inevitably the case, these ways of seeing my post deviated in differing degrees and places from my intentions as the author of the post. In fact, this is one important reason for putting one’s thoughts into words and inviting critique. Part of the reason, of course, is to critically assess the content of what one is saying—to identify places where one’s reasoning is faulty, etc. But part of the reason is to identify places where one needs to refine one’s mode of expression in order for one’s intentions to be more precisely characterized (which is why criticisms that are based on misunderstanding are often helpful, and not something simply to be dismissed).

At the same time, sometimes readings of a text that deviate from the author’s intentions are just fine—even something to encourage rather than bemoan. I'm reminding of some of the great conversations I've had about literature. The sharing of alternative readings is one of the great delights in such discussions--and this delight would be seriously truncated were we all to feel the need to simply focus on what the author intended to say. In cases in which I’ve been privy to conversations about short stories of mine, it has usually been a pleasure to hear how others see the story—often in ways that never occurred to me as I was writing it (but which nevertheless strike me as entirely fitting “readings” of it).

Of course, in philosophical discourse there is often an attempt to communicate a precise idea. But even in such cases others may “read” a text in valuable ways that don’t match the author’s intentions. It is not unusual for me to hear (at conferences or in print) a restatement of my argument that draws out of it insights I wasn’t explicitly thinking about at all and so couldn’t have intended to assert—but which, on reflection, seem to be working as a kind of undercurrent to my thought that has now been brought to light.

Even so, in many modes of discourse (including philosophical ones) authorial intent still operates as a kind of standard against which alternative readings need to be assessed. How closely does our way of seeing the text conform to what the author was trying to say? Sometimes, when the author is dead or otherwise unavailable, this question inspires careful study of the author’s historical and cultural context, as well as of other works by the author, etc., fuelling any number of scholarly activities and debates. Rival scholars can propose very different ways of seeing the text, but unlike those engaged in a more free-flowing conversation about literature, the alternative ways of seeing proposed by the scholars are tied to a standard outside the text. That is, these scholars are making a truth-claim about something that isn't a part of the text but plays a role in their reading of it--specifically, a truth claim about authorial intent.

When the author is alive and accessible, of course, one can always ask the author to clarify what he or she means. The problem, of course, is that the resultant clarification is yet another “text”—one which will likely be amenable to alternative readings or ways of seeing, some of which will be closer to the author’s intentions than others. But the process of clarification is not, therefore, pointless. As authors discover the different ways of seeing their text (by having it actually seen in these ways by various readers), they can fill in details or gaps that can help to rule out gross misreadings and bring it about that readers see the text in a manner ever closer to the author’s original intention.

(Of course, a reading of a text is itself a text that is likely amenable to various readings—a fact which adds an additional layer of complexity to the communicative process).

Let's take my previous post, and one of the comments about it, as an example. In that post, as you'll recall, I made use of the duck-rabbit image--which I'll reproduce here so no one will feel the need to scroll back to the previous post:

I used this image to propose a way of understanding (at least much) religious language (ooh! a way of seeing religion that invokes ways of seeing as the way of seeing! Alright, I'll stop now). I pointed out that there is a difference between offering a description of a specific feature of the image—which will either be accurate or inaccurate, and hence will say something that is true or false by reference to what is there—and seeing the image in a given way (as a duck, or as a rabbit). My claim was that religious language is often about providing an interpretive worldview whose function is to afford a way of seeing the whole of experience (as opposed to describing a feature of it).

What I hoped to do was respond to Flew by showing that there are different ways in which statements can be meaningful. Flew claims that "sophisticated" theists so qualify their claim about the existence of God that it becomes consistent with anything we might observe about how the empirical world is arranged. In so doing, Flew thinks they have rendered their theistic hypothesis meaningless.** My point (following R.M. Hare and John Hick) is that offering a statement that makes a difference in the observable facts is only one way that a statement can be meaningful. Another is to offer a way of seeing the observable facts—and such a way of seeing will be meaningful insofar as it lends a different significance to the facts than they would have under an alternative way of seeing the same facts. But a way of seeing a set of facts doesn't typically add any new facts to the set it is interpreting.

But a way of seeing might very well presuppose a broader context than the set of facts which are being interpreted. It may make assertions about what is true concerning this broader context, even if it is not making assertions about what is included within the set of facts being interpreted. And with respect to these assertions about the broader context we may ask, “Why should I believe that?”

The most critical response to my previous post, offered by Burk, relies on this point. Burk's chief objection (unless I am misreading him) is that theism is a way of seeing the totality of empirical facts that does make such an assertion about a broader context within which the material world studied by science is situated. The most significant such assertion, of course, is “God exists.” But insofar as this assertion is endlessly qualified so as to be rendered consistent with any empirical facts whatever (as Flew claims is the case with "sophisticated" theism), it becomes an assertion for which no evidence is in principle available (at least if we take “evidence” in roughly the scientific sense). In effect, Burk is saying, "Okay, so sophisticated theism offers a way of seeing the whole of experience. But so what? That doesn't negate that it is also making an assertion about reality without any possibility of evidence being adduced in its favor."

This response to my post is rooted in a “way of seeing” what I wrote—or, in more usual terms, a reading of it. Among other things, this reading seems to take my post as an effort to defend theism against not merely Flew’s challenge of meaninglessness but against what has come to be called “the evidentialist challenge”—a challenge to theistic belief (and other religious beliefs) that in its usual form runs very roughly as follows: There is no good reason to believe that theism is true, no signs or indicators that speak in its favor; and in the absence of any such evidence one should presumptively disbelieve. (Since the evidential challenge is the next unit to be covered in my philosophy of religion class, you can expect a more detailed treatment of it soon).

Now I do have things to say about the evidentialist challenge. And I do think that the distinctive character of religious beliefs—that they provide “ways of seeing” the totality of observable facts by appeal to a posited "transcendent" realm—has some bearing on this challenge. But I do not think the mere fact that theistic belief serves as a “way of seeing” the world is sufficient to defuse the evidentialist challenge. It isn’t, for some of the reasons Burk gestures to in his comment. I do, however, think it is sufficient to show a way in which such a belief can be meaningful other than the ways Flew recognizes—and hence as providing the basis for a response to Flew’s challenge of meaninglessness.

Here, then, is one way in which someone can read a text in a manner at odds with the intentions of the author: the scope of an argument can be taken as more ambitious than the author intended.

But here’s the thing. In seeing my previous post as he did, Burk was doing more than merely casting the text in a certain light. After all, what cast that light were his beliefs about something beyond the text—more precisely, beliefs about what I was intending to do or show with my argument. In this case, the beliefs in question happen to be false—but in the very act of misreading my post, Burk exemplifies a point he makes in his remark that is exactly right: a way of seeing a set of accepted truths or facts, while it does not add new truths to the set, might presuppose the truth of something outside the set.

In the case of students in a literature class offering various interpretations of a literary work, such presuppositions are not usually being made. Their alternative readings don't hinge in any way on claims about authorial intent. They’re just offering “free floating” ways of seeing the text. But in the case of various scholarly interpretations of, say, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, the alternative readings of the text may depend heavily on views concerning authorial intent. And such “transcendent” truth claims could be false.

In other words, since such scholarly readings of a text are rooted in claims about what is true about something beyond the text, it is coherent to talk about misreadings in a way that doesn't seem appropriate when the participants in a book group share their different ways of seeing the novel-of-the-month. The scholar's interpretation requires evidence, because it is not merely a free-floating reading of the text. It is a reading of the text that is paired with the following claim: "This is the reading of the text intended by the author." In fact, scholars often arrive at the reading they do by first considering evidence concerning authorial intentions--and then using that evidence to arrive at a way of seeing the text that they take to be true to those intentions.

I also think the distinction between the way that lay Christians in Bible studies approach sections of Scripture, and the way that biblical scholars do so, is very relevant here. The former involves what I'm calling "free floating" readings. Participants share their readings of a New Testament epistle and others say, "Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Here's how I see it." People go home with things to think about, perhaps a bit wiser about the human condition. Biblical scholars, by contrast, marshal evidence of various kinds to arrive at a theory about what the author of the epistle meant in this or that passage. While this theory is a reading of the text, it isn't a free floating one. Rather, it is a reading that makes a truth claim about something beyond the text, in the light of which this reading of the text is taken to be appropriate.

Consider two ways that, on viewing the duck-rabbit image, I might see it as a duck. First, I might approach it as an ambiguous image that can be seen either way, and I just happen to decide to see it as a duck for the moment. But now suppose that the image appears through an opening in one surface of a sealed metal cube. Suppose the surface is considerably broader than the window through which the image is visible, so that it is possible that what I am seeing is part of a broader image, most of which is hidden under the metal surface. Suppose I come to believe that this is in fact the case: the drawing continues beyond the limits of what I can see, with only the "head" visible in the opening. But now suppose I go even further than that. Suppose I become come convinced that what is hidden from view is an oval-shaped body stretching out below and to the right of the visible picture, complete with webbed feet. Now, of course, I see the image in the opening as the head of a duck--but not in a free floating way. I see it in this way because I have situated the visible image in the context of a certain conception of what the "whole picture" looks like.

In this latter case, it is true enough that my seeing the image in the window as a duck does not require me to deny of the image (or attribute to it) any facts not denied of (or attributed to) the image by those who see it as a rabbit. As such, my seeing it as a duck does not involve my making any new factual claims about the image. But I am making a factual claim about what is hidden behind the metal surface of the block. I am claiming that there is more to the image than we can see—and I have the audacity, if you will, to harbor a specific belief about what that “something more” is like.

I suspect that many atheists look at theistic belief in much the way that most of us would be inclined to look at the person who not only sees the image in the metal block as a duck, but does so as an extension of the broader conviction that the visible image is part of a larger one we cannot see (but which the person is happy to attribute details to even so). At least initially, harboring such beliefs seems strange. How could someone be willing, in the total absence of any glimpse of what is underneath the metal, to embrace the view that there is an image of a duck body there? And why would anyone think that such belief is legitimate?

It is in such cases that the evidentialist challenge to religious belief becomes significant. And since that is the topic being covered this week in my philosophy of religion class, it will also be the topic of my next post.



**I actually think Flew overstates his case when he says that the "Believer" in his parable about the invisible gardener has qualified his claim about the gardener so much that the claim has become consistent with any facts whatever. After all, what prompts the "gardener hypothesis" in the first place is a set of fact--a beautiful clearing in the woods, with flowers arranged in a distinctively appealing manner, etc. Were it not for this set of facts, the gardener hypothesis would never have been made in the first place. After all, that hypothesis amounts to a "way of seeing" the clearing. If there is no clearing, then there is nothing to see in that way. And a similar point can be made about theism: Were the elements of human experience radically different than they are--no aesthetic or moral experience, no moments of mystical encounters with the numinous, nothing but chaos in the physical world, etc.--the theistic way of seeing might not make any sense at all. It would be like seeing the duck-rabbit image as the football player attacking a penguin.

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.