The community’s understanding of truth
There was also the Presbyterian minister who commented (and replied to comments, in an obliging and patient way) on Jerry’s post yesterday. He’s the liberal kind of minister, which is good in its way (less likely to persecute sinners and doubters, that kind of thing), but not convincing. What he said sounded merely evasive and empty to me (and to others). It sounded like what you would say if you were a liberal minister in an age of science; it sounded more like excuses than like theology.
There are lots of priests, pastors and theologians in the Catholic Church and in many other denominations who would describe the resurrection as mystery or metaphor. What is essential in these branches of Christianity is the confession of faith in the resurrection, not a scientific explanation of how it happened.
I can’t make any sense of that. It’s a mystery or metaphor, yet what is essential is the confession of faith in it. What is a confession of faith in a metaphor?
I asked about that, and he politely answered (he really was generous about replying – if it’s the metaphor that makes him like that, well, that’s some points for the metaphor):
As I said, religious claims don’t fit into some kind of universal discourse. They have a peculiar character rooted in the story of each religious community and its story. So I’m sure that this does not make a whole lot of sense to you, any more than other people’s religious claims make much sense to me.
Which amounts to atheism, if you think about it. He thinks it doesn’t, because the story of each religious community makes sense to that community, therefore atheism, but I think it does, because if the other claims don’t make much sense, then there’s precious little reason to think any such claims make sense.
A later iteration:
Just because it’s a story doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and by true I don’t mean scientifically true, but true within the framework of the community’s understanding of truth, which is a kind of truth that is thousands of years older than scientific truth.
But what does that mean? How is that not just empty verbiage? What does “true within the framework of the community’s understanding of truth” mean? If Wittgenstein were here I would ask him, but he isn’t, and anyway I probably wouldn’t understand if he explained, and he would probably hit me with the poker rather than explain. Meanwhile I can’t make any sense of it – it just looks like an evasion, and (I apoligize, Rev. Simpson) rather smug about it – smug in the sense of being indifferent to its lack of real meaning. There is something rather smug about allowing oneself to be persuaded by verbiage in that way. Communities don’t get to have their own understandings of truth. They get to have their own stories if they want to, but their own truth? No. They can call it that, but it won’t be
true.
As a lifelong atheist, but only a post-9/11 avowed atheist, I can identify with this guy’s anxiety. I mean, there must be something to this tradition to which he’s dedicated his life, if only because there are so many people to whom it seems so meaningful. He has yet to arrive at Daniel Dennett’s conclusion about belief in belief.
Whatever happened to the Nicene creed,the minister’s statements seem nothing more than dissembling?
This is not a reference to the said minister of course, but the philosopher D Dennett, et al, recently conducted a survey of US clergy and found that there was a significant number of them who had lost their faith but were not trained for any other occupation, so they stayed in the ministry.
What would be the difference if I started a “community” around the teachings of Harry Potter?
Is it me, or does that smugness border on condescension?
He had said in other replies that while he understood science and some harsh facts about reality, many other Christians did not and that they would not be able to handle it. In fact, he as much said that if they learned that scientists were atheists and actually disagreed with religious teachings, many Christians would react so negatively that they would reject not only Jerry’s positions on atheism but would reject evolution also (and presumably whatever else Jerry believed in – kindness to cats, sleeping in on the weekend, you name it).
I wonder if this “community truth” is another way of saying that Christians can’t handle challenging ideas and need to be sheltered with lies, stories and self-deceits. Perhaps calling it “community truth” is the term he’s adopted as a wink-and-nod euphemism between learned theologians. Maybe I’m trying to find charitable explanations for this inexplicable behaviour – it would be very interesting to see how he talks in other venues.
He’s highly condescending, using po-mo gobbledygook to deflect arguments without actually addressing them, then informing his interlocutors that they simply don’t understand his perspectives on truth. Kind of reminds me of the way David Heddle argues, but with more heavily veiled insults. I imagine the lessons he gives to his grad students are rather different than the sermons he gives to the masses on Sunday.
Ken @3, the difference would be… about 2009 years?
Ooh, no, I know, about a bajillion dollars a year (highly dependant on which sect‘s version you compare to, and, I suppose, how successful your pitch is)?
What the problem here is – what is truth? To me, truth means what is factually, well, true, independent of whether we know about it. We have serious cognitive issues with perceiving the truth, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
His argument however seems to be perception as truth. That because the community perceives God, it is true to them, whether God actually exists or not.
The trouble with this line of argument looks to me of course, to be that it makes truth a somewhat useless concept. If the public believes you eat babies, then under this definition it is true to them whether you attended the last Gnu Atheist braai or not.
An anthropologist would have no difficulty parsing this. The minister is speaking of culture, and the cultural construction of identity through belief. ‘Truth’ is a label in this context for what a cultural community holds to be so, regardless of the reasons why it does so. The value of such ‘truth’ is that, by affirming it, you affirm your identity as a member of the community. Which is, anthropologically-speaking, much more important than empirical fact. It is, alas, how culture works, largely because, of course, we are slightly-evolved social apes.
It’s crossed the border and annexed it.
He seems to be saying “true” when he means “significant” or “meaningful”. I’m perfectly happy finding meaning or significance in literature or art, but I don’t feel they make the same demands as religion.
I can’t quite work out whether he’s trying to imply it’s better because it’s older. If so, and given that he believes in evolution, would he advocate a return to the “community truth” of neanderthals? Tetrapods? Eukaryotes?
Unless it simply means “no need to think about it, just accept what we say”.
The rest of it simply sounds to me as what I like to call the “religion as performance art” argument. This argument tries to save religion from giving reasonable arguments for its claims by reducing it to some sort of collective and interactive storytelling. If this is what religion is, I’m sure people can still get a lot of satisfaction from religion, just like people can get a lot of satisfaction by playing Role Playing Games. However, if you support this argument, you’d have to give up any aspirations for religion to be a basis for morality, the backbone of civilization, a contribution to politics, or any special status at all.
In the end, it’s not an argument for religion. It’s an excuse for people who doubt their religion’s claims, that allows them to not feel silly for going along with it anyway.
“If Christ did not rise from the dead,” Peter said, “all our hope is in vain.”
“Well,” says Pastor Jerry, “Christ didn’t really rise from the dead, not in any way that we’d recognize as ‘truth’. It’s a conception of risen-ness we get from the Christ-meme we hold in our hearts as a community. It takes a village to raise a Savior.”
“So,” says the average Christian, “all your hope is in vain.”
To turn the common Christian accusation around, Pastor Jerry is really a parasite on secular society. If it weren’t for the huge strides that the secularists have made in the past 200 years, his suppositions about the post-modern nature of Christ would get him killed, or, at the very least, tortured until he recanted. Although, of course, if what Pastor Jerry is saying is true, if he lived in a community that believed in the literal resurrection, he’d have no recourse but to believe in the literal resurrection.
I could be wrong about that, though.
Duke
It seems to mean something like “the story of the ressurection” (or whatver) “makes us feel fuzzy inside, so let’s keep repeating it, even if it is just like watching Moliere or Aristophanes’ plays” (insert “authors for the ages or whatever here). And the comment about the anthropologists from another commentator is correct, but that’s only because pomo has affected them too much …
At this point in a debate, the sane one should call a recess and insist on the parties coming to agreement on definition of terms used before continuing.
Well, you know, it does make sense in a way. One develops an imaginative understanding of how the story itself underlies a particular form of life, a form of life in community that one finds particularly attractive. Think of Jesus as someone who gives of himself totally for others, and take that as an image of the kind of God that one thinks, in a purely imaginative way, rules over all, and then somehow live into the story. Then you can live as though you are living in and through that story, almost as if life were a drama in which you played your part. What is true becomes what is true within the story, so that, all and only those statements are true which can be expressed within the story. Theology, in this scenario, becomes an exploration of things that are true within the story as told by your particular community. That’s really all it is anyway, because, once you step outside the story, and look at the story from an objective point of view, what you see is people participating in a drama. And, from that point of view, only certain kinds of questions can be asked, questions which the author of the drama has fixed in advance as somehow askable within the story. So that Lionel Trilling’s question, “How many children has Lady MacBeth”, is only askable if the author has included that as a datum within the story.
Think of how Mormons have created a life within a story. We can achieve more distance here, since the story is so obviously merely a construction of Joseph Smith (and according to some people, he cribbed the whole story from a rather execrable novel written around the same time). We take the story, and we live within it. All the things that are recorded in the story took place in the space of the story, and all and only those things mark the parameters within which intelligible talk about the story can take place, defining what is ‘true’ within the story. So long as you remain within the story, the things works like clockwork.
The real problem is when events force you to consider the story from the outside, as it were. That’s what has happened since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Suddenly, the story is no longer at the centre of how people must see their lives. For a time, it seems, science can be accommodated within the story, by enforcing the boundaries, and suggesting that the story is, somehow, metaphorical for the kind of life that one finds particular enriching. But then, as more and more issues gather around the story, especially moral issues which the story can no longer contain, the tendency is to draw firmer lines around the story, so that it becomes an imaginary world one retreats to from time to time, perhaps only on Sundays, when one can, within a community, suspend disbelief for an hour or so. But the world has a way of crowding in even there, because the conflicts between story and world are becoming too insistent. They have to be dealt with, and soon there is no place to retreat to. That’s when fundamentalism becomes a real issue, because, if you can’t live the story all the time, it really doesn’t function as a guide to life any longer, and the dissonance begins to overcome the story’s original power to enrich life.
Some people, like Tim Simpson, seem to think that the liberal religious project is still a possible one, and no doubt he has some success convincing some of his students that it is still possible, but it does become more and more difficult. It is especially difficult at crisis moments during life, for these force one out of the story to face things without the accustomed support of the myth. Myths are fine for ordinary life, but in a crisis, if the myth is truly broken (in Paul Tillich’s sense), it cannot function. It becomes redundant, and then one has to face the world alone. The only way to deal with this is to acknowledge that we really are alone in the universe, and there is no comfort and no help for pain, except from each other. And when you’ve reached that point, ‘story truth’ no longer works, and then, as Bertrand Russell says at his most purple,
That’s worth quoting in full, because it is, for those who have tried to live within the religious story, cold out there, and that’s why they cling so desperately to the debris of the religious past. The truth they seek is a warmer, more generous truth, and, whether it can stand up to the cold blasts of science is still a question that many of them conspire to answer with a firm, “Yes, I believe. Help my unbelief.” This cannot last long, I suspect, and that’s why I think AC Grayling is right when he suggests that what we are seeing now, in this last, bold resurgence of religion on a global scale, are the death throes of religion. It may take awhile, and it would be wise not to be too close to the dyng beast as it struggles in its death agony.
Something, slightly off topic, for Ophelia to get mad about. The Pope, in his first speech in the UK, has just revealed who actually killed the Jews in the 1940’s.
Eric, do you have a blog? I would love to read more of your thoughts.
I shan’t say thanks, Sigmund, for the Pope’s words… they make me dislike the man even more (how quickly he moves from the Jews to the poor Christians who suffered so much), and then he can get in his jab at the atheists who were responsible for the WHOLE FUCKING CATACALYSM! You could almost admire the chutzpah (is that the spelling) were the self-serving blindness not so disgusting.
Mr MacDonald, I enjoyed very much, as always, what you wrote, but you bring up again the overly ‘positivist’ remark about the irrelevance of the question of how many children Lady Macbeth had. Actually, for an actress playing Lady Macbeth, the question of her child or children and what heppened to it or them, is not unimportant for an understanding of her character (and for the actor playing Macbeth, too, it is not irrelevant): LM does say ‘I have given suck’ and that she knows what it is to love a baby; subsequently MacDuff asserts of Macbeth ‘He has no children’. Shakespeare doesn’t draw all that much attention to Macbeth’s child or children, and one can say, as some critics have suggested, that by Act IV he had forgotten what he said in Act I (I don’t have a copy of Macbeth at hand, so those act numbers may be wrong), but if we assume he hadn’t forgotten (as I am sure he hadn’t) , then the Macbeths have had a child or children and it or they have died: and that, to them, is an agony. The crown Macbeth gains is ‘fruitless’: he is mocked by a child in the vision shown him by the witches, and by the vision of Banquo’s descendants. The father figure of Duncan (a father figure to both Macbeth and, more particularly, Lady Macbeth, is killed; ‘Goes Fleance with you?’; ‘the Thane of Fife had a wife/ Where is she now?’ – the Macbeths are wounded sexually (they have no issue), and they seek to wound and destroy the sexual potency (and the continuity it supports) of others, and they end by condemning themselves to a sterility so terrible that Lady Macbeth kills herself and Macbeth (whom I have played) gives himself up almost thankfully to death. No, children are important to the play and its deep themes, and for the actor and actress who portray that couple it is important to enter imaginatively into the world of the couple, and not to pay attention to the positivist proscriptions of certain critics. I should also say it is important for anybody who wishes to come to grips with ‘the Scottish play’.
Also, the play as it has come down to us is in a late version reworked and cut down by Thomas Middleton, and is certainly not Shakespeare’s original.
Tyro:What he’s really saying is that Christianity is a much more vile religion than we give it “credit” for. Personally I don’t think that’s true. But it’s very odd that he does.
As someone who has been flittering around the edges of various religious communities on the liberal/progressive side, you actually see this quite a bit. It’s a purely defensive state.
Some people who claim to be theist, are simply not. They don’t believe in god, or at least the traditional god tropes. They want to still belong to the greater community and keep their connection and all that, so they jump back and forth between metaphor and literalism at a blinding speed, making it impossible to keep up.
I’m a person who doesn’t think it’s necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I acknowledge the community structures that religious institutions provide, and I’m not really willing to take that away from people. But all the same, this constant flittering doesn’t do anybody any good, and relying on the wink and the nod to people that they’re not really supposed to take this shit seriously is a bad thing in our society. Especially when the leaders of these religions use this stuff to increase their personal power.
Thank you Tim. I haven’t read MacBeth for so many years that the memory of it has grown dim, but, at the same time, we are still limited, in whatever version we use the play, to the words on paper, and to the intimations of something beyond the words, whether hints or guesses seeded in the words themselves. We do not have, within the play, or within theology, more than the words to go by, and, while it is possible to build up quite a complex world within those limits, those are the limits.
It is interesting that, very early in its history, the church should have striven so strenuously to inscribe boundaries for the story, so that the limits would, in fact, be narrower than they might otherwise have been, if the non-canonical gospels is anything to go by. The need for defined limits is clear. Without limits it is impossible to say precisely what the story line is, and how that story is to be lived in a life. It also, as Hector Avalos points out, artificially constructs scarce resources, so that those limits, and their boundaries, should be carefully policed. This not only contributes to religious violence. It also makes possible a secure possession that, because so carefully protected, in itself becomes something of value, to be defended and enriched by creative subtlety.
That is, after all, one of the things that makes Shakespeare so intellectually and emotionally fascinating, because of the very complex texture of his plays, and the hints which keep leading us out of the play into our own lives. I didn’t mean to suggest that the question, “How many children had Lady MacBeth?” is, as you put it, irrelevant. Of course it is not, as you point out. But we are still limited, in our exploration of that question, to the words that Shakespeare (or Middleton, as the case may be) has left us. There is, of course, a Baker St. in London, but Sherlock Holmes never lived there. And, according to the play, Lady MacBeth had a child, or children, but how many is not one that we can answer. In the same way, in the story, Jesus is, in some sense, God’s son, the Word that was with God in the beginning, but what that could possibly mean is strictly limited by the story, and all the metaphysics in the world cannot fill in those blanks, which is why Dawkins was right to confine himself to the story, and ignore the theology. For theology is a way of making the story relevant to different times and places, never very successfully, mind you, but at least it can create the illusion of understanding, and that’s all we need in order for the drama to “work”.
Once the process becomes a conscious one, however, it is very difficult to get it to work well. Certainly, it can work so long as we are playing our roles within the story, so clergy usually find it easy to maintain the role. Others do too, so long as they are very earnest about their faith, but for many the illusion is difficult to maintain, and that is why there is a gradual dwindling of religious people, except, apparently, in places where life is very uncertain and unequal, and myths are easier to live in than reality. For reality, as Russell points out, is fairly spare, in human terms. Once you get used to the idea that there is no ultimacy grounding our existence, you can, if you had relied on religious illusions to get you through the night, begin to build up meaning and purpose, but it is not easy for many people. John Schumaker may be right, to a certain extent, in thinking that many people need to keep themselves in a state of semi-hypnosis, just to spell away the darkness (see Wings of Illusion).
@The Happy Crow. No, strictly speaking I do not have a blog, although I had for awhile done some blogging for Dying with Dignity, Canada, and may return to it, once its goals are clearly stated. I am not young — 69 is slightly over a month, on Halloween — and I am not sure that I can maintain a commitment to regular blogging, tnough it is in the back of my mind. For the present, as long as Ophelia doesn’t object to my rather lengthy posts, Butterflies and Wheels is, you might say, my internet home, and Ophelia has been a generous host.
I’m off to bed (it’s after midnight here). Thank you, Eric, for your response. I didn’t mention the name of the critic responsible for the essay ‘How Many Children had Lady Macbeth’, because I was sure it wasn’t Trilling, as you said, and I’ve just remembered who it was: the English critic L.C. Knights. It’s an essay that, to my mind, sounds very splendid in its knock-down positivist approach, but one that I have always profoundly disagreed with for the reasons given above. (He’s not just talking about the number of the children, as I recall, but basically saying that we can’t tell whether the Macbeths had children or not, so the question of whether they did oor didn’t is meaningless and irrelevant.)
Tim, you are quite right, it was LC Knights. That’s the trouble with depending solely on memory instead of googling just to check!
Then again Knights was (if I remember correctly, and I think I do) reacting against a tendency to go overboard with the treatment of characters as real people approach, most notably in the work of A C Bradley.
I checked my memory after all by looking it up, and that is right – the Knights essay came to be seen as a kind of manifesto of the New Criticism: dealing with what was on the page as opposed to what wasn’t. Hamlet’s childhood, for instance, is off the table, because there just isn’t anything to work on.
I not only don’t object, Eric, I quite selfishly hope you won’t start a blog because I want you to keep commenting. Jerry Coyne is equally selfish about the matter.
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I said you were generous! And gracious too. Regarding Knights, I haven’t read literary criticism since the 60’s when I turned my back on my degree in English literature and turned my attention to philosophy. So I am a bit rusty. But that is how I understood Knights’ essay on Macbeth. I was quite taken with the New Critics at the time, and used to own some of their books. That emphasis on the texts themselves seemed to me a winning proposition, instead of wandering around in the maze of biographical and historical detail. But then, the head of the English department said, when I told him I was switching over to philosophy, “Well, I always said you treated literature more as a vehicle for ideas, than as art,” which suggests that the New Criticism didn’t bite too deep. I can scarcely remember their names now, though Richards and Cleanth Brooks stick in my mind somewhere deep amongst the untended and mouldering debris of my past. Brooks especially. A very clear writer, with a prose style like granite, as I recall; but I cannot now summon up one idea I learned from him.
To be honest, he sounds like an atheist who has just been introduced to his girlfriend’s religious parents and he’s trying to be polite without actually admitting he doesn’t believe a word of what they’re saying.