Seems like there is substantial interest in discussing the existence and/or extent of Noah’s flood.
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
I think we can assume there was a flood behind the story. I mean, floods happen, and how could people of that era have conceived of a flood if no one had ever witnessed one?
I continue to be intrigued by the possibility that such floods could be associated with the end of the ice age. There are also strong hints of climate change in the old stories.
Or maybe not A flood, but rather a story written in an area prone to flood in which a FLOOD would be a readily imaginable catastrophe for a dramatic story.
There’s this lovely bit of research by Irving Finkel about the origins of the story, arguing that the “original” ark was circular. – a huge circular coracle.
I saw a documentary where they actually built a scaled up version.
It was so lovely I bought the book, which was delightful.
keiths, to KN:
Lizzie:
It’s both. Why assume the categories are mutually exclusive?
A claim about what God did in response to humanity’s evil is clearly a religious claim, but it’s also a claim about reality. It’s assertoric.
I don’t know where KN got the idea that all religious beliefs are non-assertoric.
FWIW, Fifth takes them to be both assertoric and true–whatever it turns out that they mean.
KN,
And:
It seems pretty clear that you want your own religious beliefs to be exempt from criticism, and that you are stung by the New Atheists’ disdain for such beliefs.
But how does classifying them as “non-epistemic” help your case? As Bruce points out, a commitment to act on unjustified beliefs is fair game for questioning.
Someone who “non-assertorically” believes that the Messiah will come is saying, in effect:
Looks pretty irrational when you spell it out.
Murrayesque, indeed.
Glen Davidson
How is it a scientific claim at all? Is it based upon observation, or merely some kind of religious imagining?
Falsifiable it may be, but so is a host of other non-scientific claims–unless we’re going with Coyne’s rather unhelpful redefinition of “scientific.”
Another religious claim might be, “Jesus was born of a virgin.” Theoretically falsifiable, and hardly based on actual evidence.
Glen Davidson
I had in mind Quine’s arguments for methodological naturalism, and I find those severely inadequate because of the conception of language on which they rely. But there might be some version of non-Quinean methodological naturalism that I would accept. Sellars is also a naturalist, and the long-standing question within the Sellarsian community is whether Sellars’s commitment to discursive pluralism (the “polydimensionality of discourse”) is consistent with his commitment to scientific realism. The divide between the left-wing Sellarsians (McDowell, Brandom, Price) and right-wing Sellarsians (Millikan, Churchland) turns on precisely this issue.
In any event, as far as the authority of science goes, I don’t see why I need “methodological naturalism” as such; all I need is verifiability as a criterion of epistemic significance. (Needless to say, verifiability is a matter of degree.)
I envision the conversation being rather as follows:
“I believe X”
“Why do you believe in X?”
“In my religious community, that’s what we believe.”
“What about people who aren’t part of your religious community?”
“They are free to hold whatever attitudes towards X that they want; it’s not my concern.”
It is true, as Sellars nicely phrased it, that
But I can happily accommodate that insight while also saying that there is a distinction to be drawn between different senses of “anyone”: the other people who are part of my particular religious community, and the other people who are not part of my particular religious community but who are part of the Community of all rational beings. The former is defined by shared norms that are restricted to members of that community, whereas the latter is defined by shared norms binding on all.
On this view, the attitudes, assumptions, convictions, and so forth of any particular religious community cannot be in any sense rationally binding on anyone who is not a member of that community. And that means, in turn, that they have absolutely no political authority or epistemic authority — if one thinks, as I do, that the political sphere should be democratically organized and that the space of reasons is (something like) the epistemic dimension of democracy.
In short, the kind of religiosity I am suggesting here is sharply divorced from both politics and from science. It is, I think, the only kind of religiosity consistent with the radical Enlightenment that began with Spinoza and from which all of modern life developed. To reject this — to want religion to have a political and epistemic authority — is to reject modernity. And that is exactly what religious fundamentalism is: a rejection of modernity.
Kantian Naturalist,
I see it continuing with “Why do you and the rest of your community believe in X?”
I had something more mundane in mind, eg from RationalWiki
“this assumption of naturalism need not extend beyond an assumption of methodology. This is what separates methodological naturalism from philosophical naturalism – the former is merely a tool and makes no truth claim”
If I understand the SEP article correctly, Quine was making a broader claim than that.
I think questions of (unadorned) naturalism and of scientific realism are different from methodological naturalism in science. So I don’t think the above is relevant to my concern.
As Patrick also notes, it is not the criticism from outside the community that I had in mind; rather it is whether people within the community can reason about their non-epistemic beliefs. For example, if X was “people are directed to stone adulterers” does your argument justify that religious practice?
I think religious beliefs should not be privileged to avoid criticism when they either direct people to commit immoral acts or when the practitioners hold favorable attitudes to immoral acts. (I’ve tried to make my point using a non-cognitive metaethics to align with the non-epistemic status of religious beliefs).
I understand that there would have to be a rational argument about why should acts are immortal. My points is such an argument is not avoidable by defining religious beliefs as non-epistemic.
That’s completely erroneous. My view is that anyone’s religious “beliefs” are part of a religious community governed by discursive norms specific to that community, and so don’t count as inferential moves in a public space of reasons.
I put “beliefs” in scare-quotes here because I do think that “beliefs” are epistemic and assertoric. Though I suggested a non-assertoric sense of “belief” above, I think it is better to make a sharper distinction between assertoric and non-assertoric discourse. In doing so, I’d put the concept of “belief” on the assertoric side of that distinction.
The thought that I am stung by the New Atheist’s disdain for religion is also completely erroneous. As I said earlier, I am stung by their intellectual mediocrity and I do not suffer fools gladly. In contrast, I admire and respect Philip Kitcher, whose Life After Faith is quite excellent. But Kitcher is a good philosopher, whereas Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins are not. (I exempt Dennett from my criticism of the New Atheists, since his position is more nuanced.)
Rather, someone who non-assertorically says, “I believe the Messiah will come” is saying, “I do not think that ‘the Messiah will come’ is a claim that corresponds to reality, but I am committed to a certain ideal about how we ought to live and I structure my life in light of that ideal”.
I don’t see what’s irrational about drawing the contrast the real and the ideal — between what one holds to be true of reality and the ideals to which one is committed.
Though I haven’t read it yet, I’m very much looking forward to The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do. I suspect I’d agree with almost everything Lindsay says. The question for me here is, what kind of religiosity is compatible with secularism? And my proposal is, a religiosity as non-assertoric discourse — what Charles Taylor calls “disclosive” language — is the right way of thinking about religiosity consistent with secularism.
I’d rather just call that a methodological commitment to verification as a criterion of epistemic significance and leave the term “naturalism” out of it.
That’s all quite right — ethics is not grounded in religion, and when religion conflicts with ethics, it is religion that must give way. The practices of a religious community are trumped by human rights and civil rights. I’m a cognitivist about ethics and a non-cognitivist about religion. (Was that not obvious?)
While we here at TSZ often talk about Christianity because it is more familiar, I would like to bring to your attention this article from today’s NY Times: ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape (Note: graphic descriptions of sexual slavery and rape.)
I bring it up as a concrete and relevant example of how religious discourse can be used to justify atrocities, which is a concern we all share here.
[Nothing to do with Noah. At this rate I’m going to become the BornAgain77 of TSZ. At least I have better taste in music.]
And what is it that leads you to believe that all assertoric claims are scientific claims?
Given how people are religious, I don’t know if this is remotely practical, or even desirable.
Guess I’m a fundamentalist then. 🙂
What do you mean about religion not having any epistemic authority? Do you mean that religion should offer no claims which offer any basis for belief?
I don’t understand the second question.
Kantian Naturalist,
You like the blues?!
And heavy metal!
KN,
You wrote:
I’m just asking what you mean. To want religion to have epistemic authority means to desire what, exactly? That religious claims be believable? That they be capable of justification? That they have some basis in fact and evidence?
Put another way, what belief about religion with respect to it’s having epistemic authority entails a rejection of modernity? Does “epistemic authority” mean dogmatism?
[As an aside: Is modernism dogmatic about it’s rejection of dogmatism?]
Mung,
I conceive of epistemic authority as connected with rationality and universality — a claim counts as a move in the space of reasons insofar as anyone can consider it as true, as reasonable, as justified by available evidence, and so on.
By contrast, I think that religious discourse, to the extent it is consistent with the Enlightenment, is governed by norms specific to that specific religious community, and so as not rationally binding on everyone.
We have seen, I think, that the only way a religious community can impose its particular norms on all is either by law (as the Religious Right in the U.S. seeks to do) or by violence (as the Islamic State does). Neither is compatible with the ideals of the Enlightenment or with the kinds of modern societies made possible by the commitment to those ideals.
If I understand you correctly:
1. Religious practice can be criticized on moral grounds, if it seeks to impose its dogma in the political domain, or if it contradicts an Enlightenment ideal.
2. Religious belief can be criticized by adopting the norms of rationality of the relevant community.
What about conflicts between communities which are not covered by the above? For example, what if one community believes in proselytizing members of another community (without coercion). If the second community objects, is there anyway to resolve the disagreement? Perhaps only in the case where the two communities can find common norms as the basis for discussion?
Another example: what about the LDS practice of baptizing dead people of other faiths. Can people outside the LDS community criticize this practice? If so, on what basis?
LDS is welcome to chant whatever nonsense they want over my grave. How can that hurt me?
Obviously, I am not KN. But that is roughly what I took from his posts. And I’m inclined to agree with it.
I would think that fits the first principle. That is, it can be criticized on moral grounds. It’s perhaps only a minor moral issue.
I’ll admit that I mostly just laugh at the absurdity. But I think that too can be criticized on moral grounds (it is a kind of coercive proselytizing).
Principle 2 is, I think, important. We often see people criticizing YECs on the grounds that the evidence does not support them. But the counter point is that they have their own standards for evidence, and the evidence that they accept does support them. For example, scientists calibrate their history clocks with various radiometric dating methods, with tree rings, etc. But the YEC instead use the bibilical chronology for their calibration standard. I don’t see a basis for saying that their standard is wrong, though it isn’t our standard. The best we can say is that their standard does not work very well (is pragmatically poor).
What moral standard did you have in mind? Is it morally wrong to try to change someone else’s religious belief?
I would agree.
On top of that we don’t even have a basis to say that “working well” is an appropriate standard by which to judge the correctness of our standards
peace
To me, it seems rude and intrusive.
My inclination is say that standards are neither correct nor incorrect. We often judge correctness in terms of standards. But we often don’t have standards for standards. Often we just adopt a standard to have a consistent way of doing things. So “works well” does seem a reasonable criterion for that.
I see a kind of two level organization. At the basic level we adopt standard on a pragmatic basis. At the next level we judge correctness, truth, etc in terms of those adopted standards.
I’d use goals as one level.
For the second level, I’d use the combination of both the measures of success in meeting goals and processes used to attempt to meet the goals. Pragmatic justification of this combination is a joint evaluation of how well the process satisfies the goals as captured by the measures, and jointly how well the measures work by seeing what sort of processes achieve optimal measures. It is a joint optimization of measures and process.
(If you separate the measures from the process, I think you might get into an infinite regress of measures, standards for measures, standards for standards for measures, etc).
For science, the goal is prediction, control, explanation of the contingent world in a way that works for everyone.
For science, the resulting process is the usual one: verification, transparency to peer review, agreement with other science, simplicity, falsifiability, etc. Measures of success of a process in meeting the goal would be how well it does in producing working technology, acceptance by the scientific community, successful, novel predictions, and so on.
Pragmatically, we conclude science is the best method for explaining, predicting, and controlling the contingent world.
A different standard would be incorrect in the sense that it was not the optimal way to achieve the goal.
But if you have a different goal, eg be faithful to a literal interpretation of the bible above all, then you would come up with a different process. The challenge then is to justify any of your actions which rely on science and technology.
BruceS,
Yes, that’s what I’ve been getting at. Thank you; I think that helps nicely. And I agree with what Neil and Petrushka said above in response, too.
As usual, the only major respect in which I disagree with Neil is that I want a tad more realism in my philosophy of science than he does. But how much is a “tad”?
I think that the causal powers of phenomena — how much they resist, thwart, or cooperate with our actions — co-determine whether our practical interventions in the causal order succeed or fail, and this is grounded in whether the causal powers of those objects “mesh” with our sensorimotor abilities and the technologies we use to augment them. So, yes to pragmatic success, but pragmatic success itself requires minimal realism about the causal powers of the phenomena themselves.
Although it is constitutive of our discursive practices that we give epistemic weight to the criterion of success or failure, whether or not those practices *actually* succeed or fail is due to the causal powers of worldly phenomena, not our practices with which we engage with them.
Yes — and therein lies a nice contrast between a mere rejection of modernity, as with the Amish (link for non-Americans), and a rejection of modernity that uses modernity while doing so. As several scholars have pointed out, if the ancient Israelite cosmology were correct, then GPS would be impossible. And the Flood narrative in Genesis makes complete sense in terms of that cosmology.
The various attempts to make the Flood come out as literally true while accepting a roughly Einsteinian cosmology are laughable, since they all require a variety of purely ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses that serve no purpose but to save the literal meaning of the text.
It’s reasonable to suppose an entire civilization or settlement was wiped out by a flood, such as with the Black Sea Hypothesis, and then remembered through story-telling. Assuming something along the lines of a catastrophic breach, there may have been warnings about the impending inundation. Taking animals in pairs, along with seed, is a very common practice.
But we often make do with sub-optimal. And maybe there isn’t a unique optimal way. That’s why I don’t like to use “correct”.
Apart from that quibble, I mostly agree.
I agree with that.
Where you see me as questioning realism, is when I resist saying that scientific theories are true.
Take an example. When radioactivity was discovered, this could have been seen as a violation of conservation of energy. Scientists took the step of treating it as another form of energy, thus preserving the conservation law. But they could have found different ways of looking at it, whereby it did violate conservation. Both ways could have adequately described reality.
It’s unavoidable that science make choices (and that culture makes choices) on how to describe reality. We should not consider those choices themselves to be part of reality.
As an extreme example, in USA we drive on the right side of the road. In Britain, they drive on the left. Both choices meet the same goal of reducing the risk of head-on collision. Reality doesn’t dictate which choice — it only dictates that we should make a choice.
People having pragmatically poor frames of reference vote, hold office, make decisions affecting everyone. To the extent they have no power or Influence, I have no criticism. In a democracy, however, everyone has some power, and groups of like minded people can hold great power.
Neil Rickert,
I don’t think we disagree, except perhaps that I’m more comfortable using “true” to mean “pragmatically successful in light of available evidence”.
If you are interested, the philosopher whose definition of computation I’ve talked about in other posts is posting at Brains Blog on the ideas in his new book on physical computation.
Not a lot of depth, although his replies to some of the comments supply a bit more detail.
Or their lack of religious belief. 🙂
Thanks. I’ve added that to the blogs that I follow.
I don’t think that choice in scientific theories in mature sciences like much of physics is as arbitrary as you make it sound. It is not at all like deciding on rules of the road.
A blogging physicist discusses why in more detail here (about half way down starting with “about the second part of our question”.)
I understand that this on its own does not imply that entities in mature scientific theories are real, although it could be used as part of of argument that this is the case.
There is an actual precedent for denying conservation of energy as you discussed: Bohr proposed giving up on the strict conservation of energy due to difficulties in understanding the energy spectrum of beta decay. But Pauli disagreed and solved the issue by adding the neutrino to physics.
I spent some time at that blog. I disagree with Piccinini about computation, in that he takes it to be physical while I take it to be abstract. He denies that abstract objects exist. I agree with that, which is why I’m a mathematical fictionalist.
But I think that disagreement is not important. My disagreement with computationalism is for different reasons. Basically, computation begins after there is data. I see science and cognition as beginning before there is data. And the part that occurs before there is data, is what I see as particularly important.
KN,
That’s silly. Religions are full of assertions about reality, and many of those assertions are absolutely central.
I agree, which is why it was mystifying to hear you speaking of “non-assertoric beliefs”, which is oxymoronic to my ears. Religions are full of beliefs, and they are assertoric.
I still await your demonstration of their “intellectual mediocrity”.
I thought we just agreed that beliefs are assertoric. Someone who believes that the Messiah will come believes that the Messiah will come in reality.
Such an unfounded belief is fair game for criticism.
Let’s turn back to your own religious beliefs. You referred earlier to your experience of a “divine presence”.
If you were referring to an actual divine presence, then your comment was assertoric.
If you were referring to the actuality of your experience, but making no claim regarding the reality of its referent, then your comment was still assertoric.
What is the non-assertoric interpretation of your statement?
Glad you found the papers worth some time.
I think Piccinini admits both mathematical and physical approaches to computation. But not computation as an abstract object (since he rejects them).
I am not sure what you mean when you say computation is only abstract. Do you mean physical computers don’t compute?
I recall you define computation as necessarily semantic (involving representation) whereas he thinks only some computation involves representation. So he will see computation where you don’t. Although I don’t think he has committed to the view that all the brain does is computation.
I don’t think so — I think it is expressive of the experience, not a description of it.
When someone says, “I love you!” they are not describing their feelings or making a report about their feelings — the utterance is the expression of the feelings, and the feelings culminate in the expression.
Likewise, when I say that I experience the presence of the divine as immanent in my experience of the world, I’m not making a claim but expressing an attitude or feeling.
Which is precisely why it has no epistemic role, or to say the same thing differently, why there is there no corresponding obligation on the part of anyone else to take me seriously. I do hope that my close friends and lovers will be at least accepting (if not embracing) of this part of myself, but that’s on the private side of the private/public distinction.
For the sake of my consistency, I refrain from using the word “belief” in expressing my religious attitudes, since I want to be careful in how I carve up the territory between my epistemology and my spirituality. The category I came up with earlier, “non-assertoric belief”, is for the sake of charitable interpretation of believers who lack my epistemological scruples.
keiths, to KN:
KN:
The expression has assertoric content, as does the opposite expression “I don’t love you any more.”
I think walto is right — you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too. When you say
…you are making a claim about your experience. Your statement is assertoric.
Except that it isn’t accurate and it isn’t charitable. Most of the faithful, after reciting their religious beliefs, would be absolutely offended if you said “Oh, you don’t really believe all of that. You’re just expressing attitudes, not actual beliefs.”
They believe, KN.
Two points . . .
(1) the first-person voice makes a bigger difference here than I think you give it credit for. When someone says, “He believes in God”, that’s a claim about my attitudes. When I say, “I believe in God,” that’s not a claim (though it may function as one, under certain contexts) but an expression. To treat expressions of religious conviction as claims looks to me like assuming that replacing the third-person with the first-person doesn’t affect the pragmatic force of the utterance, and I don’t see how that can be right.
(2) I simply don’t know what people of faith really believe, or if they really believe what they say they believe. For all I know, they might be using the word “belief” to convey an emotional responsiveness.
I once knew a Jewish woman who preferred Conservative Shabbat services over Reform Shabbat services, because the Conservative services are all in Hebrew and there’s almost no English translation. But, it turns out, she doesn’t know Hebrew will enough to understand the prayers! When I asked her about this, she admitted that she doesn’t really care about understanding what she’s saying — she finds the sound of the language deeply comforting. At the time, I thought this was intellectually dishonest. Twenty years later, I have a better understanding of where she was coming from.
For all I know, the same is true of Jews and Christians who say their prayers in English — it’s the emotional resonance that’s doing the work for them. In other words — again, for all I know, which isn’t much — they could be non-cognitivists about religion and simply not know it!
But again — to reiterate a point I’ve already made several times here — I think that cognitivism in religion, or using beliefs in the assertoric sense, is probably going to be much more prevalent among religious conservatives than among religious liberals. And that’s deeply bound up with the fact that religious conservatives want their religious convictions to carry weight in the public sphere, and that means taking on the right form to function within the space of giving and asking for reasons.
I’m not saying that a non-cognitivist view of religion tells us what religion is really all about. I am saying that it is a way to reconcile religiosity with a secular state and a pluralistic culture. So I’m not saying that religious conservatives who insist on an assertoric sense to their religious beliefs are mistaken about the nature of their own beliefs; I’m saying that they are holding their beliefs in such a way that is incompatible with the political ideal of the Enlightenment.
You’re also saying that when they say stuff like “God actually does exist,” unless they mean something like “Mmmm. Yummy!” their assertions are all always false. That is, you’re saying what Stevenson et al. have said about ethical judgments.
You’re not actually doing them any favors, I don’t think, in making apparent statements about God, heaven, creation, etc. into the equivalent of a variety of (generally satisfied) grunts.
Close, but not quite. I feel like I’m repeating myself here, though, and that’s getting frustrating.
Whether your average person in the pew is secretly a non-cognitivist and just doesn’t know it is an empirical question. I have no idea how to go about testing it; it’s simply a hunch that I have. Maybe my hunch is off because my experiences have been skewed due to my background in liberal Judaism and Unitarianism.
Of course there are people who are explicitly cognitivists about religion and know it. I’m suggesting that those people are more likely to be religious conservatives than religious liberals, because of the deep connection between rationality, publicity, and democratic legitimacy.
And I’m further suggesting that non-cognitivism about religion is both (a) more common among religious liberals than usually recognized and (b) a nice way to reconcile religious convictions with the epistemic demands of rationality, publicity, and democratic legitimacy.
I’m actually not happy about using the terms “cognitivism” and “non-cogntivism” here, because I don’t mean to suggest that religious attitudes and the vocabulary in which they are expressed lack conceptual content. What I am suggesting rather is that not everything with conceptual content functions as a claim or assertion. Poetry, painting, and music have conceptual content as well — or at least, I worry that an insistence that poetry, painting, and music have only nonconceptual content is motivated by a picture of conceptual content as linguistic or propositional, and that in turn will undermine our ability to understand animal minds.
I’m in favor of drawing a distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic understanding. My own preferred mode of thought is non-linguistic. That may be one reason I am so unimpressed by theology and philosophy. They do not connect with me.
Kantian Naturalist,
What I’m saying is that YOU’RE saying is that those religious conservatives you call “cognitivists” are always uttering false statements. And I’m frustrated that you won’t own up to that.
Yep, that’ll do it. 🙂