Sometimes things don't go as planned. My Parable of the Free Beer seems to have landed with a resounding thud, so perhaps a word of explanation is in order.
First, in case it wasn't obvious: yes, it was intended to be an allegory about theology, and Christian theology in particular. Replace "free beer" with "God's grace" and you have an almost verbatim transcript of sermons I have heard street evangelists deliver. In fact, I remember one street preacher in Santa Monica back when I was making my movie literally take a five dollar bill out of his wallet and ask, "Who would like five dollars?" and then go on to say that God's grace was infinitely more valuable and "all you have to do is take it." It wasn't literally free beer, but in those days you could still get a beer for five dollars. (Maybe you still can. I don't actually much care for beer.)
Second, it was supposed to be funny. If you didn't think it was, well, go get yourself a sense of humor. You can order one from Amazon nowadays.
Last but not least, the Parable was intended to make a serious point, namely, that without an independent standard (like evidence) how is an honest Seeker of the Truth supposed to choose from among the many religions on offer in today's market? You've got Christianity, which comes in so many flavors it is like the Baskin-Robbins of theology. Islam comes in two major varieties and handful of minor ones (like Sufism). Then you've got yer Buddhists and yer Hindus rounding out the world's major religions. But wait, as they say in the trade, there's more: there's Jews, Jains, Mormons, Scientologists, Raelians, Bahais, Satanists, Wiccans, and good old fashioned neo-pagans. (Give me that old time religion! It was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me.)
This is the question faith cannot answer: on what basis should one choose where to put one's faith?
“If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
ReplyDelete― Dalai Lama XIV, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality
If A==>B, does B==>C?
ReplyDelete>Last but not least, the Parable was intended to make a serious point, namely, that without an independent standard (like evidence) how is an honest Seeker of the Truth supposed to choose from among the many religions on offer in today's market?
Just because:
Multiple religions (A) ==> not all can be true (B)
does not mean
not all can be true (B) ==> none are true (C)
>This is the question faith cannot answer: on what basis should one choose where to put one's faith?
Did someone inform you that you wouldn't have to make a choice?
Is choice bad?
> not all can be true (B) ==> none are true (C)
ReplyDeleteNote that you can say the same thing about competing scientific theories. Not all of them can be true either. (In fact, that's a *requirement* for a theory to be a scientific theory: it has to be falsifiable.) The difference is that in the case of science there is a basis for making the choice: experiments. In the case of faith, there is no such basis.
BTW, "none of the above" is always an available option, even in the case of science. We don't yet know what dark matter is, for example.
> [...] without an independent standard (like evidence) how is an honest Seeker of the Truth supposed to choose from among the many religions on offer in today's market?
ReplyDeleteWhat would it look like for there to be evidence to adjudicate? I want to be very careful here: having evidence that a religion's historical claims are likely valid doesn't seem to have much of any bearing on the goodness of that religion. My suspicion is that evidence doesn't settle the matter of what is good, although it can help inform it. What if some of the difference between various religions is what they consider to be the ultimate good? Can evidence really adjudicate that matter?
I started writing up my own thoughts on how one could rationally adjudicate between religions, but it got a bit clumsy. Following is a rewrite which may be marginally better.
I think part of my problem is that when people talk about 'science' and 'evidence', they usually have the hard sciences in mind. There, the matter of interpretation can be shoved well off into the distance. One can pretend that there is this "neutral point of view". The thing is, religion is much closer to the soft sciences, the human sciences, than the hard sciences. I argue that the human sciences cannot escape interpretation, interpretation which goes beyond the evidence:
>> The time seems ripe, even overdue, to announce that there is not going to be an age of paradigm in the social sciences. We contend that the failure to achieve paradigm takeoff is not merely the result of methodological immaturity, but reflects something fundamental about the human world. If we are correct, the crisis of social science concerns the nature of social investigation itself. The conception of the human sciences as somehow necessarily destined to follow the path of the modern investigation of nature is at the root of this crisis. Preoccupation with that ruling expectation is chronic in social science; that idée fixe has often driven investigators away from a serious concern with the human world into the sterility of purely formal argument and debate. As in development theory, one can only wait so long for the takeoff. The cargo-cult view of the "about to arrive science" just won't do. (Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, 5)
Now, I'm not claiming that there is absolutely no interplay between choice of interpretation and the evidence. Instead, it seems that the interplay is much trickier in religion and the human sciences that it is with the hard sciences. And yet, your talk of "an independent standard" smells like an appeal to the model of the hard sciences. Perhaps I am incorrect?
> What would it look like for there to be evidence to adjudicate? I want to be very careful here: having evidence that a religion's historical claims are likely valid doesn't seem to have much of any bearing on the goodness of that religion.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I'm not talking about the *goodness* of a religion, I'm talking about the *truth*. There is no guarantee that the truth will turn out to be good. It would be nice if it did, but there's no particular reason to think that it will. And second, yes, of course I'm not talking about historical claims here. I'm talking about contemporary claims.
The reason that the standards of the hard sciences are apt is because many religions make physical claims. For example, Islam and Christianity both claim that there is life after death, that the soul survives the body. This is a physical claim subject to scientific inquiry. For example, is it possible for the living to communicate with the souls of the dead? If so, how? If not, why? Both Christianity and Islam further claim that if you do not meet certain conditions then you will suffer eternal torment after death, so the truth of the matter is of no small import. (Happily, all the evidence is that both Christianity and Islam are simply wrong.)
If you want to talk about what is good rather than what is true, well, that's a separate discussion. But I believe that what is good follows from what is true (and not the other way around!) so it's important to get a handle on the truth first.
Ron, I've spent a bunch of time thinking about the below. I might have figured out enough to possibly push forward.
ReplyDelete> First, I'm not talking about the *goodness* of a religion, I'm talking about the *truth*.
The first thing to note is that science requires values. Indeed, there is a possible Euthyphro dilemma:
>> Even more important, Kuhn never squarely answers the question, What is the epistemological status of the values that he isolates? Echoing the type of question that Socrates asks of Euthythro, we can ask Kuhn, Are the criteria or values accepted by scientific communities rational because these are the values accepted by scientific communities, or are they accepted by scientific communities because they are the criteria of rationality? (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, 58)
I think I've posted the following before, to articulate a bit on those values:
>> The classical pragmatists, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, all held that value and normativity permeate all of experience. In the philosophy of science, what this point of view implied is that normative judgments are essential to the practice of science itself. These pragmatist philosophers did not refer only to the kind of normative judgments that we call "moral" or "ethical"; judgments of "coherence," "plausibility," "reasonableness," "simplicity," and of what Dirac famously called the beauty of a hypothesis, are all normative judgments in Charles Peirce's sense, judgments of "what ought to be" in the case of reasoning.[7]
>> Carnap tried to avoid admitting this by seeking to reduce hypothesis-selection to an algorithm—a project to which he devoted most of his energies beginning in the early 1950s, but without success. In Chapter 7, I shall look in detail at this and other unsuccessful attempts by various logical positivists (as well as Karl Popper) to avoid conceding that theory selection always presupposes values, and we shall see that they were, one and all, failures. But just as these empiricist philosophers were determined to shut their eyes to the fact that judgment of coherence, simplicity (which is itself a whole bundle of different values, not just one "parameter"), beauty, naturalness, and so on, are presupposed by physical science, likewise many today who refer to values as purely "subjective" and science as purely "objective" continue to shut their eyes to this same fact. Yet coherence and simplicity and the like are values.(The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, 30–31)
Criticisms of Kolmogorov complexity working for the 'simplicity' above can be found at IEP: Simplicity in the Philosophy of Science.
Therefore, I challenge you, Ron, to defend the idea that:
(1) either science does not depend on values
(2) or these values are not 'goodness'
(3) or that this is a special kind of 'goodness'
(4) or something else
More after you take part in this "choose your own adventure". :-)