How does she know?
I saw a few minutes of a Bill Moyers tv thing last night that included some chat with a fresh-faced young person who had just graduated from something called (unpleasantly) ‘Regent University’ – it’s apparently run by Pat Robertson, and includes John Ashcroft on its faculty. The fresh-faced young person told the camera that she believes in Absolute Truth. ‘Not grey, not relative, Absolute Truth, which is God’s truth.’
Nothing surprising there, of course, but all the same I wondered (as I often do) how she knows. How does she know? How does she know what God’s truth is?
She doesn’t, of course, but that’s what’s interesting, because she thinks she does. Why does she think that?
Largely or entirely because she’s had little opportunity to think anything else, I would guess. But all the same it is a little bit interesting that it tends not to occur to people to wonder how they know what they think they know. I don’t think it occurred to me much when I was her age (and I had much better opportunities that way, I imagine). On the other hand it could be argued that it ought to have occurred to her, because she was full of her plans to go out and tell everyone else what she knows, and urge them to know it too, and persuade them to be like her by her example of being good and living a good life. She had missionary plans, teaching plans, evangelical plans; therefore, perhaps, she had some duty to think about the material she was planning to teach, and whether she had any real reason to think it’s true, and any real right to try to get other people to think it’s true. Perhaps she had some duty to wonder, if God’s truth is Absolute then God must want us to know what it is, and if God wants us to know what it is, why doesn’t God tell us all what it is in such a way that we cannot make a mistake? A duty to wonder not in the sense of trying to think of the most plausible explanation that will leave her idea of God intact (God wants us to be free; too much evidence might be bad for us; God wants to woo us; God has told us but we turn away because we are evil; the fool hath said there is no God), but in the sense of really thinking about the question. It is a real question. If it’s so absolute, and it belongs to God, why doesn’t everyone know it, with no questions at all?
I have no immediate plans to enroll at Regent University in order to find out.
I think the reason that so many of us here are hostile to the theist types is because of the arrogant certainty they display of possessing the Absolute Truth, in spite of the obvious deep complexity of reality. Why is it all so easy for them, when the rest of us genuine seekers are struggling to see through the fog? It’s just not fair, and the “truth” they believe in is nothing more than mythology.
Amen and hallelujah, Doug!
I work my ass of to master a large and complex body of evidence and reasoning in hopes of achieving some reasonable confidence in some of my claims about the world – which, after all that effort, still remain subject to further revision based on reexamination of that evidence and reasoning – and these blinkered pig-ignorant self-righteous ignoramuses who’ve put no effort whatsoever into asking tough questions dole out their easy answers with the utmost possible conviction that they are right, satisfied without any hesitations or limitations in their own rightness and righteousness. And where does their absolute conviction come from? Hard work? No. Struggle? No. Rigorous analysis? No. Painstaking effort in gathering and evaluating evidence? No. Rigorous, open criticism? No. Blind faith and unquestioning obedience to authority? BINGO!
It does get under the skin a bit, that.
What? “Pig-ignorant”? G, allow me to point out that you are insulting a graduate of Regent University. They must be well educated; some 150 of them have served in the GW Bush administration. Bite your sacrilegious tongue!
Enroll? No, teach OB. Sign the loyalty oath (“I am loyal to Jahweh and even those sorta nasty things he did in Judges”) with a pseudonym – Minny Mouse will do – and confront those eager students with a big, sharky smile next semester.
Atheism is simply non theism? read the above comments!
It’s getting worse, too.
esterday, i went down the market for my weekly veg-shopping. THREE separate groups of christian brain-dead attemting to corner and preach to the passers-by!
And, as Ophelia says, its’ always THEIR SPECIAL “god”, and never any of the alternatives on offer.
Scary.
I can see now, why the Imperial Romans sometimes persecuted the christians, if they were that much of a permanent pain in the ear, the arse and the poor old brain.
( Gumbies need not apply )
“Atheism is simply non theism?”
Yes, Richard, it is. Atheists getting annoyed with theists who lack humility is not an integral part of lack of belief in god. It is an addition, for which theists lacking in humility have only themselves to blame. You show me a society in which the believers have never tried to foist their views on the others and I’ll show you a society in which that justified reaction has never manifested itself. Our present situation, in which almost all leaders of religions have promised hell to non-believers, is not an example of it.
Ophelia, Doug and G, eloquently put.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to poll ‘religionists’ and find out what percentage are able to define ‘epistemology’?
Richard…. brain… engage…..
Richard, please. This is so basic. I have nowhere claimed that vociferous anti-theism is inconsistent with atheism, I have merely pointed out that non-theism is the minimal definition of atheism. Saying ‘Look what some atheists say!’ is not a refutation of that.
Sorry Mr Gilmour, I live in Loindon, and I appreciate the problem only too well, with a US-owned collection of dangerous blackmailing churchgoers (note I do not name them) brainwashing their gullible followers occupying a “church” building less than 100 metres from my house.
And the aforementioned christians making it difficult to do one’s shopping in peace, and with at least one mosque somewhere around here espousing the purported virtues of “Khalifa” – to the extent that someone living opposite said christian church mentioned earlier was taken away by the anti-teroroist police a couple of months back, and he hasn’t been seen since – I assume he’s in Belmarsh.
In some ways the danger may be greater here, because it is not obvious, and we’ve had holy Tony and his chritian cronies, and the MCB st al going on about “point of view” and “cultures” to the point of not being able to stand up for objective truths …..
It is very worrying.
You’re right that this young woman has probably not had any opportunity to think that what she’s learned is “God’s truth” might be wrong.
If you’ve been carefully shielded by your parents all your life, you’ve never even heard that questioning their beliefs is possible. Probably you’ve been “home-schooled” (the Christian kind is not real home-schooling; it’s more like home-brainwashing), and all your little playmates have come from the same type of families.
Aristotle issued the dictum that “all humans by nature desire to know,” which is probably true, but he forgot to add that this desire is all too easily satisfied. If you’ve been properly protected, you *think* you know already, and that’s enough to slake your thirst.
“if God’s truth is Absolute then God must want us to know what it is, and if God wants us to know what it is, why doesn’t God tell us all what it is in such a way that we cannot make a mistake?”
Maybe we should ask the teachers at the college what it was they taught the student to have made her so absolutely sure that the Absolute God she believes in is the Absolute Truth. ‘Not grey, not relative, Absolute Truth, which to her is God’s truth.’
It sounds like she has been absolutely brainwashed.
In a bizzarre way, I have to admit that were I religious, I’d have to get absolutist. I mean, there’s just as little rational basis for the subtle nurturing and progressive bits of religion as there is for the take it litterally, eternal immolation and war-is-good set; I think that fundamentalism would have quite a lot more appeal than boring old touchy feely relativist stuff, especially when I was in my twenties and all sensitive and paranoid. It must be a great comfort to just KNOW the truth without knowing jack sh1t.
Oh – so one is supposed to stop being all sensitive and paranoid after one is in one’s twenties?
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
whatareyoutryingtosay????!!!!!!!!!
snicker
The joke was directed this way
[points repeatedly and emphatically at self]
not that one
[points at Nick S]