Up is not Down, Out is not In, Yes is not No
Ah – things become a little clearer. I became curious about a commenter who keeps conflating theism with theology, so I googled and found a blog, where conflation turns up again.
Early in the month, a friend called my attention to this Salon interview with philosopher of science Michael Ruse, talking about evolution-vs-creationism. Ruse is pointing out some of the argumentative excesses of science (for example, the rantings of Richard Dawkins, which I’ve blogged about before) and he’s trying to stake out space to allow someone to endorse both science and religious faith. I liked what he had to say. As I’ve seen argued elsewhere, atheism didn’t exist before the Enlightenment.
Just by the way, that’s not true. Consider Lucretius and Epicurus and Democritus, for instance; and consider the entire world; and consider all classes and conditions, including people who lived out of the reach of clerics. But that’s a side issue.
According to Ruse, scientism, positivism, secularism, whatever you call it, is a worldview, quite comparable to a religious worldview in that it dictates modes of thinking, patterns of rhetoric, and certain cultural norms at the expense of other valid norms.
Hang on – you can’t call ‘it’ those three things interchangeably, because they’re three different things. You might as well say ‘According to X, mysticism, Biblical literalism, spirituality, whatever you call it, is a worldview.’ Different things are different things, and it’s impossible to get anywhere in a discussion or analysis by blithely tossing them together and saying ‘whatever you call it.’ Making careful distinctions is a crucial part of careful and critical thinking. We seem to have a habit of mind, here.
This Ruse interview caught the notice of Butterflies and Wheels, who quickly proceed to belittle Ruse. This is an example of why I lose heart for this type of argument. Ophelia of B&W pretty bluntly admits her ignorance of theology on her way to dismissing it as a serious discipline. This is Richard Dawkins’s M.O. as well. In the way of many scientists and analytic philosophers, they are overly literal, clumsy in their use or interpretation of metaphor. Also, they argue by way of snark and bullying, of unacknowledged biases and a distinct arrogance in the face of something they don’t know much about.
This is probably where the confusion started. In that comment, I did indeed talk about theology, because Ruse did. That was the subject of that comment. But it was not the subject of a later comment, which was not about Ruse, but about Paul Davies, who did not mention theology, but rather belief in God, which is not the same thing. ‘…belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics.’ Distinctions again, you see. Theism is not theology, and theology is not theism. And more: asking questions is not necessarily the same thing as admitting ignorance. Asking questions is a (well established) part of argument and analysis. And I still think the questions I asked are both serious (as opposed to being ‘snark and bullying’) and legitimate. I still want to know: if God is outside of nature, how can theology exist at all? How can human beings study or inquire into something that is outside of nature? I can see how we can speculate about it, imagine it, tell stories about it, have hopes and dreams and wishes about it – but I fail to see how we can make an ology out of it. That by the way is an argument with (or a question about) what Ruse said, more than it is about theology itself, because for all I know (there is some ignorance – I don’t know) theology in fact does not hold ‘the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature.’ Maybe theology repudiates that idea for the very reason that it would make theology itself a nonsense. But Ruse is the one who put it forward, not I. He seems to think it is still a respectable theological view.
So: let’s keep our distinctions distinct. Scientism is not secularism, secularism is not positivism, and theism is not theology. (And cheese is not peanut butter, Keats is not Shelley, blue is not green, dog is not cat – see how this goes?)
‘ if God is outside of nature, how can theology exist at all? How can human beings study or inquire into something that is outside of nature? I can see how we can speculate about it, imagine it, tell stories about it, have hopes and dreams and wishes about it – but I fail to see how we can make an ology out of it.’
BAM and BINGO!
Perfectly said.
I’m unclear as to how the validity of a ‘cultural norm’ is ascertained.
I don’t think it is Dawkins and like-minded atheists who are being “overly literal and clumsy in their use or interpretation of metaphor.” WE believe God actually IS a metaphor. It’s a concept, an idea which represents the human propensity to visualize and understand our world in familiar terms. It’s art. It’s allegory. It’s high poetry.
Seems to me that it’s the THEISTS who are the ones being overly literal, clumsily taking a fine metaphor and crudely interpreting it as if it were an actual concrete object, a personal being or disembodied consciousness which actually exists and relates itself to people.
Perhaps they should stop looking at God in such a prosaic, mundane, shallow way, and dig deeper into the abstract symbolism.
And the thing is…the speculation and dreaming and storytelling could be so interesting. It could be so much more involved with fantasy, and utopianism, and ideas about how things should be. Perfect world thoughts. Instead of the dreary pinched bossy thing that so much religion and religous rhetoric is now.
“Perhaps they should stop looking at God in such a prosaic, mundane, shallow way, and dig deeper into the abstract symbolism.”
Just so. Even I can see the value of having for instance an idea of a being who stands for goodness – for megakindness or megacompassion, and the like – as something to aim for, live up to, admire. But the literalism just turns it into a big cop to threaten everyone with.
“Perhaps they should stop looking at God in such a prosaic, mundane, shallow way, and dig deeper into the abstract symbolism.
‘Just so.'”
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Wasn’t that basically Joseph Campbell’s project?
I quote from the first chapter of the posthumously released “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor” (New World Library, 2001):
It made me reflect that half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” (1-2)
>>
I imagine Campbell’s too “woo-woo” for this group, too influenced by Jung. Yet he did attempt to explore that middle way between “fact” and “lie” in what often seems a rather canny, hard-headed fashion. And he always insisted that what we needed most was new myths informed by new scientific discoveries, in the wake of which “we can no longer look for a spiritual order outside of our own experience.”
Stephen, sorry, I had to cut a big chunk of that, for copyright reasons. Quotations have to be fairly brief.
Very sorry, OB. It’s the last paragraph that signifies.
Quite all right! You didn’t know. I was just explaining why I’d meddled.
“As I’ve seen argued elsewhere, atheism didn’t exist before the Enlightenment.”
“Just by the way, that’s not true. Consider Lucretius and Epicurus and Democritus, for instance; and consider the entire world; and consider all classes and conditions, including people who lived out of the reach of clerics. But that’s a side issue.”
If atheism is simply lack of theism, that means it existed before religion. So, although dating might be a little tricky, one could say that atheism ruled unchallenged from whenever our species can be said to have existed until the first person articulated the idea of a god.
I wonder if Ruse has undergone some kind of transformation.I recently noticed the rave quote that appears in “The Blind Watchmaker,” including: “It succeeds quite brilliantly… I hope I will not be thought to be pushing things to an embarrassing point if I say that Dawkins’ book can be compared to Galileo’s, not only in type but in standard.”
It’s not as if in that book Dawkins avoids the theological conclusions of evolution that now seem so disturbing to Ruse; on the contrary, he’s extremely emphatic about saying not only that evolution is the only explanation that works, but that religion has no place presuming to compete (“… the Genesis story… has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants”).
Dawkins hasn’t changed his tune about religion (other than taking the gloves off since 9/11, but he was hardly wearing them before); what has Ruse been undergoing?
That’s what I keep wondering. Thanks for that quote – highly interesting.
You go for it guys!
Dawkins is spot on. Characterising his words as ranting is a serious act of ‘disinformation’.
Interestingly, the level of tolerance of the concepts of religion above is much higher than I am used to here… I think some extremely valuable ways of examining them are posed, much better than ‘the truth claims of fundies are lies’.
How can we make an ology out of it?
Would a useful analogy be political science? Surely that area too is based in examination of social constructs, hypotheticals and dreaming. Or imaginary numbers; the sq root of -1 is a nonsense, but the mathematics of imaginary numbers based on it are directly applied in modelling the behaviour of electronic components.
I think theology is based in several constructs, especially ‘a priori’ that a God is postulated and is reflected in the Christian and Jewish scriptures; and that the accumulated speculations and writings of certain people accepting the founding assumption form a starting point for the ology.
So we have a subject of inquiry, whether imaginary or not; and we have a body of writing and thinking about the subject which is in some way subject to academic discipline. There is some minimum qualification to be an ology. ;-) The attack on the right to be an ology therefore fails.
You need to pick a clearer point of attack against this codswallop. That point is where they claim that alternative ‘worldviews’ are equally valid. In examining science that is just unacceptable. The author uses a bunch of verbiage to sound scientific or at least ‘theoretical’ but it is at root bullsh1t.
And to defend God with cultural relativism – well are you the author of TDOFN or not???
Just some small comments
G. Tingey – For the record, Ruse is definitely a philosopher, and a Darwinist one at that. I would also imagine quite a lot he has written outside of his recent spat with Dawkins would fit B&W quite well (for instance, his essay collection “Is Science Sexist?”).
OB –
“I still want to know: if God is outside of nature, how can theology exist at all? How can human beings study or inquire into something that is outside of nature? I can see how we can speculate about it, imagine it, tell stories about it, have hopes and dreams and wishes about it – but I fail to see how we can make an ology out of it. (…) Maybe theology repudiates that idea for the very reason that it would make theology itself a nonsense.”
– I do not believe that the Augustinian position Ruse articulates is dominant within theology (but I’m not a theologist, there’s more than a bit of ignorance here as well). I would venture that even if theology would make study of “God” impossible because it places it outside of Nature, it could still study, in various ways, religious doctrine, its history, etc. Theology does not just deal with God. And where one might doubt theology is a “science” because of its subject matter, I think that many of its constituent parts (historiography, philosophy) can well be “scientific” in and of themselves (as I think ChrisPer argued above). So in that sense I absolutely agree with your distinction between Theism and Theology (which Ruse does seem to conflate in the quote you cited).
As for Atheism before the Enlightenment – I would say that it implies a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and a rejection of the latter, which did indeed begin with the Greeks, but I’m not sure whether such a thing can be posed for a time “before religion”.
Have another look at the first quote: “According to Ruse, scientism, positivism, secularism, whatever you call it, is a worldview, quite comparable to a religious worldview in that it dictates modes of thinking, patterns of rhetoric, and certain cultural norms at the expense of other valid norms.”
what “other valid norms”?
Start with a religion: one can easily see how it act “at the expense of other valid norms” such as science. Now move on to “whatever you call it” – what “valid norms” are damaged by it? And what does the writer mean exactly by “norms” ?
BTW: I like that “whatever you call it”. It suggests the reader can put into or omit from the concept being discussed anything he/she likes with the inevitable result that two people who actually agree could have a blazing disagreement because they are talking about different things, or – more likely IMHO – two people who really disagree could end up thinking they are in accord. I can’t make up my mind if the writer is too lazy to define the concept clearly or if he is unable to see the need for greater precision.
Merlijn,
Well, if theology doesn’t just deal with god…then it ought to rename itself, it seems to me. Ology names (always excepting astrology!) are usually pretty precise about what it is they inquire into, aren’t they? Geology, biology, psychology…
So there’s a factual question. Is theology just a synonym for comparative religion or religious studies? Or is it what its name seems to say it is: theistic studies or theism studies.
Sorry for late reply, OB. Again, my knowledge of theology isn’t that good. But all the other -ology names you mention are relatively young disciplines (meaning, 19th century or younger) – the name “theology” at least is considerably older, and there are others of the same age with names that don’t really make sense (philosophy, philology).
I would, personally, gather that theology _is_ largely synonymous with religious studies with that difference that theology is centered on Christianity. And at least the religious studies types I know are interested in Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. It’s true that the vast majority of theologians are religious – but I do not believe that this matters a lot for those aspects of theology which are academical. And I think it would be possible to be an atheist theologian (and I’m sure those are in fact out there).
Yet the academic level of theology probably varies a lot with the university where it is studied and particularly with the religious current that inspires it – with, probably, the Jesuits on the high end of the scale and the radical protestant Evangelists on the low end of the scale, as a precondition for good theology seems to be the idea that the Bible is not the literal word of God, and, therefore, can be studied with methodologies which are usual in humanities/liberal arts disciplines. But then again, I’m partial to Catholicism :)