Resonant phrases
I want to dispute one small item in Philip Kitcher’s “Militant Modern Atheism.” [pdf]
He describes the people in between the mythically self-conscious and the doctrinally-entangled, “whose ideas about how to interpret doctrinal sentences are far less definite.”
They are not prepared to say, with the mythically self-conscious, that there is no defensible interpretation of those sentences on which they are committed to the existence of transcendent entities. On the other hand, they are not willing to offer any definite interpretation that would provide a content to which they would subscribe.
Oh those. Yes. The hand-wavers; the resorters to purple language. What about them?
Many of them are inclined to take refuge in language that is resonant and opaque, metaphorical and poetic, and to deny that they can do any better at explaining the beliefs they profess.
Yes indeed, yet they also get very huffy if anyone dares to suggest that this might hint at a certain amount of…vagueness and even emptiness in those “beliefs.”
If pressed, they will admit that they can only gesture vaguely in the direction of something that might commit them to the existence of transcendent entities — or might not.
And then they will call you shrillandstrident, for good measure. They will call you a bully; they will call you a New Atheist; they will accuse you of being unreflective.
Their lack of definiteness frustrates militant modern atheists, who find no value in the resonant phrases that pervade theological discussions, but believers will contend that literal language gives out here, that as with great poetry, religious language somehow functions in ways that cannot be captured in the preferred modes of speech of their opponents.
No no no! That’s where Kitcher goes quite wrong. I’m not having that. I find plenty of value in resonant phrases themselves, just not when they pervade theological discussions. But resonant phrases? I yield to no one in my finding of value in them. King Lear for instance – King Lear is full of them. Most of them are brutally simple, but resonant all the same.
“I remember thine eyes well enough.”
“No sir you must not kneel.”
“Art cold, my boy?”
There are three just off the top of my head. Absurdly simple, but if you know the play, they’re like gunshots.
But in fact the way they work can be explained, and they don’t point vaguely in the direction of a cosmic boss who gets to tell us all what to do, and they don’t pretend to be making claims about the nature of the universe. Religious language does not function in the same way as great poetry, and it’s just self-flattery to claim that it does. (Notice that I don’t go around saying my writing functions the same way that Shakespeare’s does. That’s because it doesn’t. Believers don’t get to claim that priestly guff does, either.)
Yes, I think this is where Richard Norman has the better of Kitcher. I don’t think you can pry the orientation off the beliefs in quite the way that Kitcher suggests. I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t really work, because, even with the orientation language, the beliefs are there, vaguely, in the background all along. And the huffy response that people make when you try to scale the significance of the language back, so that it no longer expresses belief, but, say evincing a sense of orientation, is a good indication that the beliefs are working in tandem with the orienting activities and practices. In computer context, it’s like a process running in the background, while you use the computer for some other purpose. When you make a change to a picture in Photoshop, you can preview the change on the screen, but the change is made by all sorts of calculations and changes in the code, which you can’t see. Well, an orientation is like that. It’s the screen preview of what is happening in the background, as you fiddle with the belief system. But if you brought what you were doing to the belief system clearly to consciousness you’d see at once that you couldn’t do that, that would represent an abandonment of faith. So, yes, I think you’ve put your finger on an important blind spot in Kitcher’s analysis. Hadn’t thought about it quite like that. Does this make sense?
‘evincing’ should be ‘evinces’
Kilcher:
That’s asinine.
And the “resonant phrases that pervade theological discussions”? Oh, you mean the hazy, purposefully obfuscatory language maneuvers that theologians use to wriggle out of the fact that there’s no there there? Yeah, sure, that’s just like “great poetry.” Seriously, if you can’t see the difference between some sophisticated theologian’s nonsensical prattlings about the trinity and Shakespeare’s sonnets, then something’s wrong with your brain.
I like the idea of a program running in the background. Believers who are pressured by inquirers will often defend the idea of a god that doesn’t interfere with natural processes, and when they win a tiny concession that yes, it’s not logically impossible that something like that could be true, respond that that’s the Christian god. The background program reasserts itself whenever it gets running room, hibernating when the heat goes up.
I absolutely agree with everyone here; to compare that sort of vague, obfuscatory ‘resonance’ with good or great poetry is ridiculous. The latter is resonant because it has a strong focus.
Eric, yes it makes sense.
The orientation depends on the beliefs. Without the beliefs…the orientation seems hard to sustain, especially if no one can manage to hang on to the beliefs any more. But the beliefs are always and inherently dangerous…so we can’t undertake to protect the orientation by backing off from disputing the beliefs.
Perhaps the strongest claim one is entitled to make is that they weren’t written by the PoMo Generator. On the other hand, this could be solid evidence that someone has built a Theo Generator, with access granted only to an elite few.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rational Humanist, Camus Dude. Camus Dude said: Religious language does not function in the same way as great poetry, and it’s just self-flattery to claim that it does. http://t.co/pRnRfyA […]
Precisely! I think perhaps in the church of his youth Kitcher did not see much that was dangerous. It was a world that was always afternoon, and there was tea in the vicarage garden. and men whose lives were drudgery found some solace there. And he can think of his friend with MS who has been such a help to so many, and found the strength in faith to do it, but if she were paralysed and wanted to die, no one would help her, and she would have to endure until her ‘natural’ death, and she would be told to find comfort in sharing her sufferings with Christ, lying in spastic pain, unable to speak. I’m sorry, the whole thing is too much of dog’s breakfast for me. Religion is too dangerous, and needs to go. Orientation isn’t enough, and it can’t outlast the last believer.
You leave off closing parentheses, for instance, ;-)
But the point is valid: there is nothing ‘poetic’ or ‘profound’ about the kind of discursive gibberish produced by, say Alister McGrath, Karen Armstrong or Alvin Plantinga. The aim of poetry is to make hidden things known: the aim of theology is to keep hiding nonsense.
Who was it said: “No matter how much he tortures the English language, he completely fails to make it give up its meaning?”
Oh yes, I meant to fix that! Thanks for the prod.
And quite. Try some John Haught for real torturing. Or Tillich. I find Tillich unendurable.
Eric, I think your analogy is very good, and crystal clear. On the subject of speech acts, Searle uses the same sort of language (the analogy of the foreground/background). It’s very useful when we’re talking about implicit beliefs.
Anyway. When I read this article a few months ago, I was mildly shocked by its contents. I thought it was both incendiary and puzzling.
a) Incendiary, because there’s this inappropriate language of “militancy” to describe proselytization. Mind you, I think the New Atheist’s self-definition as “hostile to religion” is reactionary and boring. But I at least have enough sense of proportion that I would not imply that Gnus are foot soldiers for Kommandant Dawkins.
b) Puzzling, because it seems like Kitcher is giving advice that some of his targets do not need. Portions of the second half of The God Delusion are about the supposed therapeutic role that religion has in human life, and the theme of the corrosive effect of faith itself is one that Dawkins repeats like a broken record. Also, Hitchens is obsessed with the role of religion as a way of orienting oneself, and the mental habits it creates. Granted, these offerings are incomplete, and they are not what is given emphasis (at least, not in Dawkins’ case). But they’re there, and any serious discussion of the New Atheist literature will do well to pay closer attention to what has been said.
That’s rather well put.
And that’s exactly why what I’m saying (contrary to what some anti-gnu people would claim) doesn’t necessarily mean I think poetry that is about religion isn’t great poetry. John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ devotional poems, the Puritan-inspired poems of Anne Bradstreet—all works of tremendous lyrical beauty and formal mastery. The fact that these works are about something that is make-believe doesn’t disqualify them as great poetry. (I.e., “The Last Supper” is a masterpiece whether or not the tomb was empty on the third day. The Iliad is great whether or not Zeus really existed.) The standards by which we judge the value of great art have no resemblance to the standards by which we (should) judge the value of theology. The whole notion that theology is somehow doing something akin to high poetry is, when you think about it, offensive. I hope there aren’t very many theologians who actually regard themselves in this way. Even in a profession known for breathtaking arrogance and self-regard, that would be jaw-dropping.
Ex-believers drop the obfuscating poetry along with the beliefs, don’t they? At least that’s what I get from what I’ve read (Barker’s book Godless, for one). How did they get so good at explaining their feelings, their orientations, not only their current beliefs and attitudes but their former ones? They are lucid and articulate. What’s changed most is the evasiveness is gone, what Tennessee Williams memorably called “the odor of mendacity”.
Pfeh. Kitcher doesn’t know the difference between language and music.
Language is to communicate. Its ability to resonate, the function of metaphor and poetry, is to convey an idea as distinctly as possible. Like Ophelia’s examples above, we relate to great writing because it drives a point home.
Music is simply sounds that we react to. Stringing together poetic phrases that do not convey a meaning allows us only to respond to the sound of them, which is fine in and of itself, but it does not masquerade as communication. We can listen to songs in unknown languages and enjoy the sound of them, but this does not mean we understand what is being communicated, if anything at all (check out “Adiemus” for a great example.) Thus the meaning that we derive from them is personal, but cannot be called language or communication.
To take such a thing, and insist that everyone recognize the message any individual has derived from it and respect this message, is simply arrogance. It’s amusing to see how many people want to consider such things as transcendent and powerful, while intentionally ignoring the bald fact that not everyone gets the same impression, which doesn’t make it very powerful at all. That’s okay with many, though, because it then is used to legitimize their claim of being “special.”
Language has many functions. Its primary purpose is to communicate, but it can also be to entertain, or to be beautiful. Sometimes language is anti-communicative, such as in nonsense poetry or in slang that is intentionally difficult for outsiders to understand. The problem with a lot of theological argumentation is that it pretends to be communicative (especially in its declarations of moral certainty) but when challenged with counter-arguments tends to fall back on a defence of being poetic. Hence we get Terry Eagleton’s article claiming that Dawkins cannot criticise the empirical foundations of Christianity because some theologians wrote beautifully.
One of the things that annoys me with religion is the poetry defence – basically trying to use resonant phrases in a bid to obscure meaning rather than reveal it.
Which is why I wrote this (Not very good, I admit, but every now and then I get sentimental):
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/expensive/2011/01/31/poetry-and-knowledge/
Art is about communicating ideas – it is a vital part of science and philosophy for this purpose but it is not epistimology. It is not simply the scientist within me that rebels at the way theology treats language like a Irish orphan, but the poet.
I have had some exchanges with these kind of types and they are the most frustrating to talk with. They mixup all kind of word meanings. They tell a particular passage in the bible is true, but they mean that passages resonates with them. They say they believe in God, but they mean they experience warm feelings when they think about a bonded humanity. They say: “God exists… but not like a stone” but if you want some clarification and ask: “Then how does God exist, maybe in the same manner as snow white and the seven dwarfs?” You get no answer. They claim not to believe in the fundamentalistic god, yet when they notice an atheïst in discussion with a fundamentalist, they side with the fundamentalist. They just can’t seperate the concept from the etiket. Even if they somehow agree that concept under discussion doesn’t exist, they can’t make themselves acknowledge that because “God” is used as the term to refer to this concept.
Ernie Keller:
“Believers who are pressured by inquirers will often defend the idea of a god that doesn’t interfere with natural processes”
and yet will not hesitate to ask that god to do exactly that – it’s called praying. Just another cognitive dissonance, I guess.
sailor1031–
In fairness some pray as an act of meditation or thoughtful focus rather than as an act of wishing. But you’re still right about 99.9% of prayers :-)
Ben, I can see boring, but do you really mean reactionary as opposed to reactive?
I suppose I can see reactionary too, in a way – old news kind of thing. But given the increasing assertiveness of theism and sentimental protectiveness of many non-theists, I think New Atheism is more reactive than reactionary.
Andy – quite so. I love John Donne, devotional poetry and sermons and all.
A guy in the audience at the talk I did in Vancouver last week asked a question along these lines. He was volunteering to be the representative from The Other Side I had hoped for when talking to Shannon Rupp. He knew of a church where the point was a fantastic choir, and what about that?
I think I said basically that I have no answer. I certainly wouldn’t want that choir to disappear…and I’m not at all confident that if the beliefs were subtracted, the choir would remain.
But on the other hand I think there’s zero chance that gnu atheism is simply going to make all religious beliefs vanish, so I don’t think gnu atheism is a threat to fantastic choirs. That may be a cop out…
Sorry for o/t comment, but has my email reached you, Ophelia?
Along Ophelia’s line, I have sung in a great chorale for many years. A lot of our repertoire is religious, yet I continue to enjoy it (as did SJG) for its cultural value. I commented once that, in my view and in spite of the obvious time-reversal, the reason that the Latin language was invented was to make possible the magnificent choral music of the likes of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and more.
Hi Peter: no, it hasn’t. Resend!
Dan Dennet has a word for “resonant phrases”: Deepity.
I mean, that’s what he means, right? Something that feels like a truism even though the words mean absolutely nothing?
Ophelia: just did. Did it work?
@27
Yeah that’s basically it. Dennett defines “deepity as
He gives the example of “Love is just a word.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg-4fmbpZ-M
A typical example of a statement that almost means something but fails to is “god doesn’t exist, he is the ground of all existence” (or “he is existence itself”). What strikes me is that there can be no better example of language used to block communication. When someone says this can they be unaware that an entity being “existence itself” is nonsensical? Human being have no experience of things having more or less “isness”, to say nothing of all the “isness” there is. What could qualify someone to make a judgment that an atheist, say, is insufficiently informed about the true nature of “is”?
At #30: That’s the great thing about Armstrong’s ineffable God. It doesn’t matter what words you choose out of a random word list, you simply defend yourself with some more ineffable language.
The word ‘orientation’ is a good work to simplify (perhaps too much so for some people) what is going on in language. So for science it would be truth or understanding, for art it would be beauty (although perhaps not for modern art which has become confused and incoherent), for politics it is power or justice, and for religion it is meaning or purpose.
But to seek meaning or purpose external to oneself means to abandon any project for self evaluation of all values, and to end up accepting whatever authority gives the most meaning to your life.
That is why religion is such a basic or fundamental problem to the modern world. This is an orientation of abandonment of individual responsibility or reason for your own life. People adhere to beliefs because they have rejected reason or personal moral responsibility.
Thus, there is no difference between a religious orientation and beliefs.
Ophelia, I don’t understand that distinction. For me, a reactionary is somebody who defines themselves in terms of who they’re against. So stances like “postmodern” and “postfeminist” are reactionary because they’d have nothing to say once the modernists and feminists shut up for good.
Same with new atheists. There’d be no need for new atheism if everybody in the whole world stopped believing in belief. By contrast, I doubt that the naturalistic philosophy would come to a screeching halt if all religious thinking were to disappear overnight.
I think that’s “reactive,” Ben. Reactionary is a different word.
The Wikipedia entry offers a pretty good history of how the term’s been handed down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
I’ve always used it to mean, as the Wiki entry says, a particular kind of right-wing authoritarianism. The pro-Mubarak goons currently punching Anderson Cooper in the face in the streets of Cairo are, to my mind, quintessential reactionaries.
Oh very well. Not “reactionary”. I can call it something else, so long as you know my meaning.
I hesitate to use the word “reactive” because it is one of those ugly words that is primarily an adjective and doesn’t much like having a noun status. If I’m going to buy an adjective I want the noun to come free in the bargain.
OED says that “reactionist” is defined as “A social or political reactionary; (also) a person who reacts to or against something”. That’ll do, if the accent is on the latter part. e.g.:
Generally in agreement with what’s been said so far.
Like most accommodationists, where Kitcher goes drastically wrong is to call basic orthodox belief “fundamentalism,” and make it sound like the Gnus are mainly concerned with the Young Earth and the talking snake.
They’re not. Never have been. Never will be.
A better word is orthodoxy, but even that sounds too strong, because the Gnu critiques don’t just apply to majority views like belief in the Trinity and the Resurrection, but to anything includes certain utterly basic, very minimal components orthodoxy—e.g., belief in a God or gods, or just dualistic souls with spiritual gifts. That includes the vast majority of “heterodox” or even wildly “unorthodox” religion so long as it’s grounded in certain nearly universal religious beliefs.
It includes not most theologically very liberal versions of religions such as Christianity, and even most people who identify as “New Age,” or just “Spiritual but Not Religious.”
Kitcher makes it sound like there is a significant number of “mythically self-conscious” religious people, who are not significantly “doctrinally entangled,” and have no significant beliefs about transcendent entities.
That’s a tiny percentage of religious people in the US, and a minority everywhere, including Europe.
John Shelby Spong might count—how many followers has he got?—but Karen Armstrong would not.
Armstrong, like almost all religious people who consider their religion compatible with scientific knowledge, actually maintains a certain very basic, nearly universal underlying belief in something like dualism. She thinks that mystical feelings/states actually reveal Deep Truth by something that amounts to supernatural ESP. She believes in “religious knowledge” that’s literally knowledge, i.e., justified true belief, even if you can’t articulate it using your limited, merely rational mind.
And that’s nuts, on any scientifically informed, rational view of the world. That is just not something minds can do. (How would it work? How could such an amazing faculty have evolved? And if it did, why don’t we see very interesting consequences of such an awesome superpower?)
I’d like the accommodationists who suggest that most religion is moderate to name one person who represents “mythically self-conscious” religion, who any significant number of religious people has (a) heard of and (b) understood and (c) agreed with, and who doesn’t ultimately endorse or at least condone some sort of thinly-veiled dualism or supernaturalism.
Sure, lots of people recognize that most religion is mostly myth, and some sorta kinda recognize that all religious belief is mainly myth. Still, almost no religious people actually disbelieve in souls that have magical properties, although some are unclear enough on the concepts of mind and matter that they don’t recognize their own dualism and magical thinking. They may disbelieve in miracles, and they’d might never call minds “magical,” because then it would sound dumb, even to them, but what they believe in actually is magical, when you come right down to it.
And that’s important, because their views of important things like morality are rooted in things like unrecognized magical thinking—they think that people can use their magical souls to divine moral truth in some way that utterly defies scientific understanding or rational analysis.
It’s hard to find something more basic and important to be wrong about.
I don’t think that it’s an accident that religion almost invariably includes a component of supernatural belief—that seems to be what makes it obviously religion. Without that appeal to some magic-like deepity, it’s just philosophy, and too arguable.
Religion is not supposed to be just poetry. It’s supposedly a different way of knowing, not just a way of talking.
Too often, the anti-Gnus make mainstream religion out to be something that’s not fundamentally about belief, but about practice, as though the beliefs are dispensible.
To steal a riff from Greta Christina, imagine a group of people who knows that their traditional narratives are actually fictional—they’re just “the stories our people tell’—but who organize around them anyway, and commune with each other and revel in a sense of shared values, optimism, and hope for the future embodied in those narratives. They have distinctive practices and gatherings, with a variety of traditional events—orations by leaders in the community, singing special songs for such occasions, sitting through a sampling of the traditional narratives again, wearing distinctive clothing representing their affiliation with that community, etc.
We do have an example of such a community that really isn’t based in literal belief, even a belief in minimal supernaturalism or dualism—many of the people in that community are dualists, but the community is somewhat disproportionately humanistic.
These people are called Trekkies, and everybody makes fun of them.
The philosophy of Star Trek isn’t bad, compared to most religious philosophies. It’s often naive and simplistic, but religions don’t generally look better in comparison—they hammer on simplistic themes, etc. too. And they get away with it.
If religion isn’t grounded in special beliefs—and in particular in beliefs of a sort that deserves special respect—why do we owe religious people the kind of serious philosophical consideration that we don’t give to Trekkies?
Is it that the Star Trek fan community doesn’t organize whole societies with Trekkieism intertwined with all sorts of cultural practices?
Would we respect Trekkies more if they took it more seriously that way?
Do we especially respect the minority of individual Trekkies who actually organize their lives around Star Trek and Trekking?
Should we respect them more if lots more Trekkies did that, and really built large, complex, enduring communities with a Trekkie identity? Where being a Trekkie played the kind of role that being religious plays in forming personal and political identities, perhaps?
Oh God I hope not.
But if we are to believe Kitcher, and religion is deserving of respect to the extent that it’s about orientation, and not silly old beliefs, shouldn’t we?
I usually have tons of respect for Phil Kitcher—he’s a serious heavy-hitting philosopher—but his spin on this is ridiculous. He seriouly needs to read Greta Christina, and imagine what religion would really look like if what he was saying was true.
Oh BTW, before anybody else points it out, I know was using “deepity” differently than Dennett. He uses it as a count noun. (One deepity, two deepities, three deepities…) I use it as a mass noun (more deepity, less deepity, boatloads of deepity).
Works either way, like “fish.”
“Deepity” is such a great word.
Re 37 above: Not a few Trek episodes dealt with social issues and problems in a sensitive and thought-provoking manner, moreso than any priest, preacher or politician ever do.
A common criticism of Gnus is that we tar all believers with the “sins” of fundies. I don’t think that’s what we’re doing. Much of the Gnu message in its various forms has to do with problems with the approach modern believers take, and I think it chafes a bit with them since they do take our side on science issues in education. And we are not happy with the “triangulation” inflicted on us by accommodationists. We have to be the bad atheists so they can be the good atheists who stay quiet about anything that might upset believers.
Not only does this burden us in a dishonest way as nasty people by definition rather than deed, it subordinates our claims to a flawed strategy that is cynical and likely to fail. For one thing, shouldn’t the reactions of atheists to being demonized be taken into account by the strategists? How did they think we would react? They must have thought that we would “take one for the team” as it were.
I don’t think anyone agreed to do this. And if anyone had asked me for permission to mischaracterize my position the way it repeatedly has been done I would have said no, as I expect most of us here would have. A srategy that depends on such an unlikely cooperation is seriously flawed. That’s not the Gnus fault IMO.
I should have said our criticism is mainly directed at modern believers and their atheist allies who support the strategy of attacking all outspoken atheists for “not helping”.
Heh, Ben. I don’t much like “reactive” either. Reactionist: fine. Nice citation.
Really. And that’s a very, very widespread mistake, or sometimes just misrepresentation. A hell of a lot of liberal fans of religion (let’s call fans of religion royalists – it’s shorter, and more pointed) seem to take it for granted that most believers are Spongesque. What a joke.
lamacher:
I think I agree, mostly, which is why I like Greta Christina’s analogy so much. The worst thing about it is that it’s so funny-because-its-true that most people probably can’t get their heads around the fact that it’s so true. And of course, if the analogy gained currency, the accommodationists would just complain about the ridicule, without acknowledging that it’s a serious, enlightening analogy, and the humor is just a side benefit.
Despite thinking it’s better than scripture, I’ve always found Star Trek (esp. the original series) to be glaringly simplistic and cartoony and dopey in some of its recurring themes—e.g., the stupid dichotomy between being “rational” like Spock vs. emotional and “intuitive” like Kirk, Kirk being able to teach alien women how to love as humans do, etc.
I realize that you’re not supposed to take that sort of stuff too literally—science fiction of that sort isn’t about realism, or about predicting how the future is actually likely to go. It’s about convenient conceits, and tropes you’re not supposed to “think too much” about, and getting on with the show, and playing with a few themes for fun, and to make a few worthy points. And it’s usually not really about aliens, but about humans—alien races are stand-ins for foreign cultures or something, if they have any particular “meaning” at all beyond advancing the plot.
That really does make it very much like scriptures interpreted as purely “mythic” instead of as “true.”
I think Star Trek is much better than the Bible for that sort of nonliteral interpretation, but even so it’s got big problems if you take it seriously. The conceits and tropes are pervasive, and they are part of the message that the show sends to a lot of people—and they’re not different enough from the bogus assumptions in scriptural stories (and the broader culture) that they aren’t part of the message a lot of people get from the show.
Star Trek is usually loaded with vitalism (e.g., sucking the life force out of a hapless ensign), dualism (mind/body switching), and loads of common folk psychology assumptions on top of that. (E.g., Spock’s so-called rationality giving him astonishing blind spots, Kirk’s emotional intuition giving him better judgment, Kirk’s miraculous genius being able to solve or neatly evade pretty much any problem in 45 minutes, etc.) There’s a lot of self-congratulatory gut thinking and “truthiness,” with Kirk doing idioting things and the writers predictably saving his ass somehow.
The show does sometimes deal with one or two of those themes in a more nuanced way, but that’s usually embedded in situation where the others are just accepted and run with.
Of course, I’m being way, way too hard on Star Trek. (What do I expect? it’s just TV show.) The demands of narrative are enormous—if you don’t use stock characters and simplistic stock situations and ideas, a lot, you can’t explain the setup and get on with the show. And if the hero doesn’t win, it’s generally not fun. Star Trek is mainly Horatio Hornblower and Gunsmoke mashed together, with starships for square-riggers and ray guns for six-shooters.
As such, it’s not bad, and it’s way better than old scriptures. It just isn’t The Wire.
—
Changing tack here…
I think Greta Christina is really right to point out that Trekkies are very much the kind of thing you’d get if the accommodationists were right about supposedly reasonable, moderate religion not being particularly about belief.
Suppose we make the analogy a little more accurate and fair, and take into account the fact that even among very theologically liberal people, there’s a spectrum of belief. It’s really hard to find a “religious” community where everybody knows the stories are all just myth and metaphor, and are okay with that. (Seriousl, are there any?)
A friend of mine is a mainline protestant minister who is about as theologically liberal as they come. (He’s been put on church trial for the crime formerly known as heresy because of it, and just squeaked by without getting canned.)
He has some congregants who don’t believe in a literal god who’s a person, or even a mysterious pervasive entity like The Force or Karma. God’s basically a metaphor or something to them, but they identify as “Christian” anyhow—but he also has congregants who do believe in a literal God who’s a person who listens to prayers, and others who believe in a vaguer, more New Agey or Platonic “God,” which isn’t a person, who are who are at least dualists.
Now imagine a Trekkie community like that, where many of the people realized that Star Trek was just “the stories our people tell,” but many did not, and thought they were mostly basically true, or just had core elements of narrative truth or just metaphysical truth—for a spectacularly kooky few, that there really was a Starship Enterprise, but for more, just that vitalism and dualism were true, such that the basic stories were in some sense credible, and could be taken very seriously even if they obviously didn’t record actual historical events.
How would we talk about Trekkies then? Would making Trek fandom more obviously religious make it more respectable? Would it help if many of the Trekkies were unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, and argued amongst themselves about which elements were fantasy, and which were real—or politely refrained from arguing over such little details?
Would it really help if the other, more “mythically self-conscious” Trekkies humored the believers, saying “it’s not really about belief,” and using that to mean that it’s okay if you can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, and people shouldn’t worry about such “unimportant” distinctions? (Isn’t it about Kitcher’s “orientation,” mainly, even if some people do believe this or that?)
Consider how little respect Trekkies get now, and just imagine how much they’d get if a lot of them actually believed in even the most basic rudiments of the Star Trek cosmology—or just the metaphysics—and publicly asserted their actual truth, based on a Trek way of knowing—e.g., maybe that they knew traveling at Warp 9 was possible, or even just that dualism was true, and that their souls could in principle be switched into others’ bodies.
We’re really not talking about fundamentalists, here. We’re not talking about the obsessive continuity geeks who try to reconcile the Star Dates of episodes, and show that all the episodes could be consistent with each other somehow, and actually believe it all.
Even supposing no Trekkies were “fundamentalists” who believed all the story lines were literally true, or anything close to that, what would we think of the “mythically self-conscious” Trekkies who defended actual believers from criticism, saying that nonbelievers were missing the point to think it’s about “mere belief” in faster-than-light travel or dualism?
I can just imagine them complaining about those unsophisticated Gnu aTrekists who rudely ask non-fundamentalist Trekkies how they could know that they really have dualistic souls, which could be switched into other’s bodies like in Freaky Friday.
I think we’d all be rather disturbed by Trekkies as a social phenomenon—how could any significant fraction of them fail to distinguish fantasy from reality, even to that extent? Don’t they know it’s just a TV show? (Didn’t they see Galaxy Quest—or did they see it, recognize themselves in it, and think that’s true too?) How could another significant fraction of them, who can distiinguish fantasy from reality, say that that’s an unimportant distinction and we shouldn’t worry about the truth or falsity of such mere beliefs? (And that movies like Galaxy Quest are just mean and militant.)
If Trekkies were so intent on promoting Trek fandom and the Trekkie community that they glossed over the distinction between fans and actually deluded kooks, how would we react?
What is really so different about “orientation”-centered religion that doesn’t clearly and emphatically distance itself from any sort of “doctrinal entanglement”?
Most believers ignore theologians. I can only think that what theologians say amounts to placeholder arguments that exist so that a small subset of believers who debate such issues can say that the arguments exist, and “see, you have ignored what the distinguished Professor so-and-so said. Clearly he knows more than you….” blah blah etc. Given the obfuscatory nature of such arguments I can’t see anyone paying much attention.
When I listened to the debate between Dan Dennett and Prof. Plantinga I found that Dennett ignored most of what the theologian said, which was an involved argument the burden of which was that Christian belief was true because no one was entitled to presume it false, an argument which didn’t even refer to the substance of what anyone believed. Has the truth of anything ever been established in that manner? Gosh, I hope not! Dennett just plowed ahead with his version of extreme implausibility, which I think is the right approach.