Say What?
It’s all been quite instructive – in fact, now I think of it, it couldn’t have been better if I’d planned it that way. I didn’t, I hasten to add, but it would have been fiendishly clever if I had. I’d be another Milgram or Rosenhan, a designer of some sort of thought experiment: what happens when a rational, secular empirical form of inquiry attempts to combine with a non-rational religious ‘faith-based’ form of inquiry? Sparks fly, is one answer.
There is more than one problem with trying to mix religion into non-religious enterprises like history or science. The obvious, glaring problem of course is the fundamental difference between making up one’s findings and discovering them. But even beyond that, there are further problems. There is for instance the way religion is saturated with non-cognitive elements that obstruct and interfere with – that are fundamentally hostile to – cognitive endeavours. Religion is all about things like loyalty, commitment, love, belief, hopes, desires, fears, wishes, consolation, community, tradition. Most of them good things, in the right place and used wisely, but not the right way to judge truth claims about the world. The weird non-sequitur of that absurd quotation – ‘All those enterprises I see as implicitly dependent on a Christian view of God.’ – is a good indication of that.
And it all goes round and round in a circle, because this very emotion-saturation is also what makes believers unable to see religion as a problem, unable even to hear what non-believers are saying. The two sides just talk past each other. As we saw in the discussion here: it wasn’t mere disagreement, it was complete incomprehension, even at the level of vocabulary. Which is interesting in itself. It’s interesting the way beliefs can shape what people are able to hear and perceive and take in – as my colleague put it, hearing not the argument as it is but the argument they want to hear.
That’s not to say that believers are all emotion and secularists have none, of course. But it is to say that emotions and commitments are central, avowedly so, to religion in a way they are not to history and science. And that does make a difference – an unbridgeable one.
Hugo Schwyzer’s choice of quotes is particularly striking when compared to these comments,which appear later in the same article, from an English historian who is also a canon in the Church of England:
Wright added that many people through the centuries have mistakenly thought they understood what God was doing. One horrible example of Christian history gone wrong: “[New Testament scholar] Gerhard Kittel lecturing in Cambridge in the 1930s wearing Nazi armbands.”
“When Christians try to read off what God is doing even in their own situations, such claims always have to carry the word ‘perhaps’ about with them as a mark of humility and of the necessary reticence of faith. That doesn’t mean that such claims can’t be made, but that they need to be made with a ‘perhaps’ which is always inviting God to come in and say, ‘Well, actually, no.’ “
How about that? A Popperian role for God–falsification rather than verification.
Oh that God, she’s so unpredictable.
But the great thing about religion, when all’s said and done, is that it makes people good. It eliminates every trace of malice and spite and petty vindictiveness, and leaves all of God’s creatures as kind as little baa-lambs. The Clio honcho has been giving a truly touching rendition of that today. I might have to convert after all, so that I can be good and sweet too.
Mr. Luker provides a new and intriguing example of the genetic fallacy:
“We are indebted to the Hebrews…for a linear view of history. It essentially assumes that history had a beginning somewhere in the distant past and that it moves toward some end.
“Whether done by Marxists, conservatives, progressives, feminists, or liberal humanists, virtually all history — including that respected by our friends at Butterflies and Wheels — is done with these meta-historical faith assumptions. Without them, it is a vanity.”
I agree with you about assumptions. Trying to find your own assumptions is like trying to see your eyes (without a mirror). It’s really much easier and more efficient to let others point them out for you.
Yes, especially when those others have such powerful glasses.
Joking aside – I keep being surprised. Here I am thinking I’m a hardened old cynic, and yet I keep being surprised at how people will let themselves carry on. I wonder if it’s a Christianity problem or just a personal character problem. I don’t have powerful enough glasses to tell…
One could say that this particular trait (looking at world through a set of glasses) is evident in non-religious aspects of life as well…
“An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.”
– Karl Jaspers : The Origin and Goal of History
Yes, of course one could, and B&W does. Those various sets of glasses are in fact our basic subject matter.
And yes, we also have our glasses, and we know we have our glasses, and we know you know we have our glasses, and we know you know we know – etc.
Maybe we just try to take them off and give them a wipe now and then?
(Funny you should mention obfuscation and evasion, because I drafted part of a N&C on the subject of argument, productive and unproductive, before getting on the computer this morning, and I talked specifically about evasion and obfuscation.)
Yes, revisit the framework of interpretation ‘now and then’.
Dialogical Hermeneutics/Gadamer? :)
Okay, go on then – what are these glasses that we’re unaware of? Surprise us!
Unaware ??
Merely pointed out that biases exist in all aspects of life…some are willing to revisit them and reconfigure their framework of interpretation (The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn – Alvin Toffler. But, more often than not religious biases lead to blind faith.
Ah. Well, no argument there. There is no view from nowhere. (I wonder what it would look like if there were. Wish I had a postcard of it…)