Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
So, not really Canadian then? Still now understandable, trying to be ‘pluralistic atheist.’
Perhaps I have to take Erik as some kind of scoundrel.
My actual response to Erik’s earlier question was:
I did not say that we recognize science by the fact that it uses empirical evidence. To suggest that would be wrong. Yet that seems to be how Erik is reading what I said.
Rejecting some empirical evidence already counts as part of the use of empirical evidence. It does not contradict what I said at all.
However, Erik is wrong about this. Science does not reject evidence that heavy bodies fall faster than light bodies. Scientific theories are not simple descriptions. The way in which science uses evidence can be quite subtle, and that subtltey counts as part of the use of evidence by science.
Probably because Gregory believes in God, not god.
Did it occur to you that your question might be ill-formed?
So, now in addition to empirical evidence, we have “subtltey”. If we went on a bit, we would also find a method in the subtlety, the scientific method.
In order to discuss the actual topic, silly things like this should not be distracting us. Yet they are, therefore no hope for the actual topic.
People who did not grow up in Toronto cannot be really Canadian? Did I read that right?
I’ve often wondered about your penchant to classify people into groups, possibly for use in demographic analysis. One of your early posts here was a survey of TSZ posters. Were the results incorporated into the book you published later that year?
But is it not possible to understand and learn from another’s beliefs without believing them oneself, as long as one was willing to listen nonjudgmentally?
I recognize that the resulting understanding might be incomplete, partly because full understanding might only be possible from within a conceptual system, a standpoint which can only be attained by believers.
But are you saying that no understanding at all is possible if one is a non-believer?
I understand you to be saying both spiritual intuition and the science of philology can be used to tell divinely inspired text from that which is not divinely inspired.
For me, science must be conducted within a community of scientists. For example, evidence is subject to review and acceptance by that community. I believe that philology is conducted this way.
I wonder how spiritual intuitions are involved in this community review of evidence. They seem to me to be essentially private and not in themselves open to public review. Does inter-subjective evidence accepted from philology which conflicts with intuition take priority over intuition?
I recognize that all science starts with subjective senses, like sight. But I see these differences between sight and how I understand spiritual intuition.
1. Sight is present for almost everyone and almost always inter-subjective agreement is reached on what is seen. But many people claim not to have spiritual intuitions.
2. We recognize illusions apply to sight and give precedence to scientific explanations of them over the subjective sense of sight in forming scientific theories. Are illusions possible with spiritual intuition?
3. Science goes beyond sight via instrumentation, such as microscopes or radio telescopes. Would philology likewise go beyond intuition? For example, would a “big data” type of text analysis (assuming that is used in philology) be used to extend and possibly replace spiritual intuition?
For example, Neil Rickert doesn’t believe that there’s such a thing as the scientific method. Can you suggest a way for him to understand that method is irreducible to science? And that this method goes beyond empirical evidence?
And this would be just a philosophical baby step. From this it’s still a very long way to go to the methodical comprehension of genres and meanings beyond literal interpretation.
Is it possible to understand it all without believing the relevance of the conceptual framework that enables the understanding? If yes, then it’s also possible to understand it without inquiring anything from me. So, go ahead and understand.
No. Mainstream philology makes no relevant distinction between folklore and scripture. Scripture is a type of folklore for those who are not spiritually inclined. Scripture is distinct from folklore for those who acknowledge (and make use of) spiritual intuition, theological tradition, and other relevant knowledge to ascertain the distinction.
No. I know Gregory is fond of the word “Abrahamic” but I’d suggest Allah, Yahweh and the various Christian Gods are very different beasts.
As an old Cornish fisherman once remarked:
I think it is possible to adopt the framework, to suspend one’s belief in it, and then achieve a partial understanding of claims made under that framework. I agree that to do so one has to acknowledge the relevance of the framework.
Of course, I try to understand things I am interested in on my own as well.
However, I was interested in your thoughts. But I understand you to say that don’t believe it would be helpful to post them in the circumstances. Fair enough.
FWIW, mung, that joke (i.e., your post) is based on a fallacy. The fact that something is comforting doesn’t make it false either.
Correct; I treat philology as a scholarly, academic discipline but I reserve the term “science” for the natural and social sciences.
Incorrect — I can happily accept any and all criteria of genre-differentiation where those criteria are themselves constituted through the history of the community of philologists.
Incorrect — I do think that some texts have a spiritual dimension to them.
At this point, however, we need a sufficiently generic conception of “spirituality”. Here’s a candidate: “spirit is what happens to us when the boundaries of the self give way” and “spirituality is the ways people seek to realize spirit in their lives”. I do think that some texts — such as Scripture, but of course not only Scripture — can play a crucial role in opening us up to a dimension of experience that goes beyond the self or ego.
What I denied above was that there is a sensus divinitatis, which I understood to be the idea that there is a cognitive or mental faculty that allows direct intuition of the divine presence. I denied that because all such posited faculties are inherently untestable, unverifiable, and question-begging.
Earlier in this conversation I suggested that all interpretation is always grounded in some tradition or other, and that there’s no way to determine how good an interpretation is without covertly using some tradition-dependent criteria. That is, there is no escape from “the hermeneutic circle.”
In response to this suggestion, Erik introduced the sensus divinitatis as a reliable criterion whereby we can distinguish the correct spiritual meaning of a text from the incorrect spiritual meaning, and where this criterion does not depend on the history of the community of interpreters. Hence, Erik thinks that we possess a capacity to leap out of the hermeneutic circle, and I do not.
To see where I’m coming from, consider the doctrinal disputes between liberal and conservative Catholics, between Catholics and Protestants, or between Episcopalians, Quakers, Methodists, Southern Baptists, and Lutherans — or between Russian Orthodox and Catholics, between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, between Sunni and Shiite.
Now: is the sensus divinitatis working correctly in (1) all of them; (2) some of them; (3) none of them? And most importantly: how could we ever tell the difference between (1), (2), and (3)? We have no way of answering that question without appealing to the very things that are trying to vindicate, and to the problem of the criterion gets kicked up a level with no resolution.
The impossibility of resolving the problem of the criterion then tells us that we should not posit any such faculty that allows us to transcend the history of communities of inquirers, since any such putative transcendental faculty could never pass muster by the criteria of knowledge constituted by the history of those communities.
Far from it being the case that I recognize only one kind of interpretation of Scripture, my point is the exact opposite: I recognize indefinitely many different interpretations and kinds of interpretation, with no possibility of determining which one is the correct interpretation (in a completely non-question-begging way).
But there’s not only inter-subjective agreement on what is seen. There’s also inter-subjective disagreement. Moreover, there’s scientific kind of seeing (the methodical way of making sense of what’s seen and explaining e.g. microscopic and telescopic detection as a sort of vision) and common way of seeing, without much analysis, mistaking one thing for another, without trust in scientific equipment, etc.
Ultimately, it’s not seeing itself that matters, but scientific analysis of the data that is obtained by seeing. Similarly, you don’t really need to have spiritual intuition in order to understand its data and analysis. Except when you think seeing with physical eyes is all there is and empirical data is all there is.
Yes, illusions are possible, and they need to be detected and eliminated. However, this cannot be done by means of empirical science. For example, if you see a very vivid dream, the memory of it is sustained during waking time. Thus memory of the dream and waking memory are one and it’s your personal job to identify the difference and to keep them apart, not to mix them up. No scientist can empirically tell the difference between dream memory and waking memory. In fact, nobody ever empirically saw any such thing as memory at all. Memory is seen internally, individually. Scientists don’t detect illusions either. These things are solely the individual responsibility of those who see them, and one must use one’s own attention, mental strength and logic to keep oneself from messing up.
If you push this responsibility to something called scientific community, you commit yourself to remain without insight in these matters. This doesn’t mean that the relevant community doesn’t exist. It exists, but the scientific work is internal, not external, it is to be conducted by oneself on oneself. But KN doesn’t believe in internal things.
Empirical science “succeeds” not by going beyond sight, but by treating microscopes, telescopes, etc. as sight. Going beyond would mean to extrapolate the analysis applicable to the empirical world into the internal world. Psychology and philology do this.
Alan Fox,
My grandfather’s version was “The cat had kittens in the oven. Don’t make ’em biscuits.”
That’s not quite right, insofar as it suggests that I deny that phenomenology is a legitimate kind of knowledge — whereas I’ve been on record here as defending phenomenology as a legitimate kind of knowledge. (It is not, by my lights, scientific knowledge, but I’ve never thought or claimed that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is, which is why all claims that I am committed to “scientism” are wholly spurious.)
I would say, rather, that any claims about what is subjectively revealed or disclosed through patient phenomenological description must be, in order to be claims at all, made in a public language and susceptible to the potential confirmation and challenge by others in the linguistic community.
That isn’t to deny that there are such claims about subjective experience — for example, about remembering, perceiving, willing, intending, and so on — but only to deny that they are immune to criticism. For any claim is, at least potentially, vulnerable to doubt, if the doubt is well-motivated in light of (what else?) other claims.
Ah yes, KN’s ecosocialism shows in the quoting of Joel Kovel, fellow Jewish, Marxist. Obviously KN privileges certain ‘interpretations’ based on his worldview. Yet how can people “realise spirit in their lives” according to a naturalist, reductionist, empiricist ideology like what KN has said he holds and demonstrates here with his horizontal philosophistry?
But wait, the fun starts. Joel Kovel converted to Christianity in 2012. Would KN show Kovel’s updated post-conversion meaning of ‘spirit’ (i.e. Holy Spirit) and ‘spirituality’? That is, KN likely thinks no ‘spirit’ was actually involved in Kovel’s conversion.
Few people like help-rejecting complainers who intentionally obscure communication using philosophistry. It seems Kovel, at least, rejected the route of disenchantment and despair.
Well, I didn’t grow up in Toronto and I’m a Canadian citizen. Figure it out for yourself how and what you wish to disclose on a blog.
The characters at TA/SZ are imo not book worthy publishing material. Just a bunch of skeptics, some angry anti-theists, a few programmers or tech people, quite a number of religiophobes and a small few actual scientists. Is the TA/SZ resistance to IDism, which started the blog, really that unique or more powerful than the critique of IDism by other more inspiring people and organisations?
Your question comes across to me as one that demonstrates a philosopher’s lack of understanding about actual people in the world. Are you aware of the field of sociology, BruceS? If so, you would realise both the importance and necessity of classifying and categorising people.
It doesn’t matter if one ‘likes’ it or not; that is how people communicate & understand each other. Maybe you and I like the same food or football team. Maybe we went to the same high school or watch the same news or entertainment channel. Maybe one votes for a single party or not, reads a particular news site, takes a particular stand on labour, environment, medicine, science, or language, etc. The labels and the history are part of how we communicate.
When people try to avoid being categorised, in a highly ‘independency’ oriented continent like N. America, even then, sociologists can categorise them. Take for instance KN: he says one day he’s not an atheist and then another day that he would accept being called an atheist. He sounds confused, yet insists he is not confused. He was born and raised as a Jew, yet we don’t know if he chose to reject religious Judaism or if his parent(s) ‘decided’ for him. We don’t know if he is bar mitzvah or if he partook in his bar mitzvah ceremony. So as in such cases as these, we can categorise based on what we know about people.
I indirectly asked what ‘faith’ you were raised in, BruceS, and directly if you accept the ideology of naturalism now. Answers to either question would bring with them a classification. But what they do more personally (i.e. not just ‘naturally’) is provide more of your story. You are not obliged to be any more specific than you wish to be…on the internet. In this thread you did announce at least your adult, current atheism. That’s apparently your ‘religious language’ nowadays.
It’s nice that you can put people in boxes, Gregory. That’s really useful.
So what faith were you raised in, Gregory?
So, don’t fill out any surveys and largely just shut up in your life if you don’t want to be ‘put in boxes.’ Reality sucks for those with a bad attitude.
Alan Fox,
I was raised to believe in God.
What about you, Alan? Is it British-French atheism all the way down?
How do you test vision, plain ordinary sight? By letting someone testify what he/she believes his/her eyes see? And if you don’t trust him/her, you take a look yourself? How is this any different from sensus divinitatis?
No, this is not how and why I introduced sensus divinitatis. I said, “Sensus divinitatis is a common faculty of humanity, same as the five ordinary senses…” Instead of intending this to distinguish correct spiritual meaning from incorrect, it enables spiritual interpretation in the first place.
And of course I reject your “hermeneutic circle” which you seem to take as unbreakable Kuhnian paradigm. Paradigms are deconstructible, analyzable. We can compare feminist perspective to WWII with the Soviet perspective, while being detached from both and holding to a third perspective altogether. Even one’s own perspective can be deconstructed. All it takes is intellectual honesty.
Similarly, sensus divinitatis obtains a spiritual reading from texts coloured by individual preconceptions when it’s untrained, but it can compare a host of paradigms of spiritual interpretations when it’s trained.
Similarly, why posit intellect? There is Nazi perspective to WWII and the Allied perspective. These two cannot be resolved. Therefore rational approach to historical events does not exist and intellect as a human faculty is an unsustainable hypothesis.
Good point, but this is only a point if you never ever read the ever-present theological disputes from Church fathers to the present day. Or if you read them but didn’t notice that they question, criticize, suggest alternatives and improvements, etc. None of them denies that there is truth, but there is lots of debate how to access and formulate it. Reductionists and scientistists deny there is truth and by this they monopolize the physicalist conceptual framework of reality and suppress debate on alternatives.
So, I encourage you to challenge prevalent points of view. It’s particularly fruitful to personal philosophy to examine one’s own presuppositions. Eventually it’s easy to devise alternatives and select the best among them, because it’s mostly just a matter of reading up. History already contains everything.
Mmmmm,kitten biscuits
But which one was that? And do you advocate the same version today?
My family were aspiring English working class. Conformity, including turning up at the local Anglican church on Sunday, was important for my mother. Oddly, I was not puzzled at the time that my father never accompanied my mother on our outings to church.
Religiosity, as far as I can see, is largely decided on cultural background and sustained by an ingrained emotional need that is almost universal (though the plurality of religious belief demonstrates it is not very specific). I appear to lack that emotional need. I don’t find religions have much intellectual appeal. Why do you find your brand appealing?
You suck, Gregory, but you are a very small part of my reality. Since I have not completed any surveys, I’m curious what box you have assigned me.
What’s your preference petrushka? Jars?
That is also my situation.
I am not a philosopher; it’s just something I’m interested in and have time to take seriously now that I am retired.
I was an IT project manager. So I dealt with actual people and actual money and actual schedules (and actual lack of sleep) all of my working life.
And yes I have heard of sociology. Though I don’t claim to know much about it. I did read and enjoyed one of Harry Collins’s recent books applying ideas from sociology to the community of gravitational wave scientists.
There is only one God, Alan. There can be only one God. Surely you know this, even in your atheism.
Porsche 911
And what are those criteria to ascertain what the divine intended? Are there non inspired parts of Scripture,for instance?
We are trying but you seem reluctant to name non silly things.
Ok, then are the other flood stories which you cited scripture or folklore?
The first question is odd and I did not even understand it the first time. When you know the divine, you know there’s just one intention, even though it’s expressed and expressible in many ways.
The criteria don’t apply to “what the divine intended”. The criteria apply to ascertaining what the genre of the writing is.
Non-inspired parts of scripture? If it’s not inspired, it’s not scripture. This is one of the criteria. There can be incomprehensible parts of scripture, insofar as interpretation is fallible.
Are you clear on the distinction between scripture and folklore? What’s the use of me telling which is which?
A bold claim! What prevents there being no gods or many?
There’s no evidence that I know of, other than testimony and reports of testimony for the existence of gods. What anyone chooses to believe seems largely a culturally influenced affair.
ETA clarity
Gregory,
That sounds like the voice of experience talking.
What country are you asserting this in Mung?
Summarizing, then: the distinction between folklore and Scripture can be made only by appealing to a “faculty” the existence of which is obvious to those who have it (or claim to have it) and unverifiable to those who don’t.
Seems like stalemate to me.
[my addition, for clarity, I hope]
RIght.
Of course, god could choose to break the stalemate if god didn’t wish to leave the question open to fallible human senses. Unfortunately, when god chose to speak to me, it only said “you’re doing great” and neglected to tell me which books I should recognize as Scripture from that day forward. And it left me just as color-blind, err, as sensus-divinatus-blind, as I had been all along.
God could raise a man from the dead.
What’s the relevance of that particular hypothetical, Mung?
I said this pages ago. Yet mutual understanding would be possible if you wanted to, simply by acknowledging that every other faculty works precisely the same way – when you don’t have e.g. sight, you are not in position to dictate how it works or if it exists. And when sight works, there’s no logical justification to call it “objective” and to dismiss interpretation of texts as “subjective”. Comparing rationally, they are both equally subjective.
I would distinguish two different possible meanings for “what is seen”.
First would be sight as it applies to ordinary objects. So “what is seen” from the LHC would be the numbers on the computer printouts produced by the analysis programs used on the data gathered by the detecting instruments. I don’t think there would be any disagreement among scientists about what those numbers are.
The second meaning of “what is seen” would be what would be concluded by scientists based on (eg) the numbers. I agree such an interpretation of observations is theory-laden and that there will be inter-subjective disagreement. Any interpretation is open to review and criticism by the community of scientists. The success of their research program shows how successful their methods for reaching agreement are. For judging the success of a research program, I would include factors like breadth of phenomena explained; cogency of explanation of predictions which were contradicted by an experiment; generation of new, surprising predictions; consistency with and application to other areas of science; applications to successful technology; and so on.
I understand spiritual inspiration as more like sight in the first sense, that is like sight related to everyday objects, and not like like “what is seen” in the sense of insight gained after a scientific review process.
I had in mind a definition of illusions such as that from the Wiki entry: “An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. Though illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people”. So that would not apply to dreams (or hallucinations) since their content is not shared.
Examples of illusions as I understand the term would be the Muller-Lyer illusion where we see arrow-headed lines of unequal length even though their measured lengths are equal and the McGurk effect where we what we hear depends on the lip movements we see.
I don’t know if there can be illusions in spiritual intuition in that sense of the word. The reason I asked was I had misunderstood philology as a being a science which could help detect divine inspiration, in which case it would help detect illusion.
I think science goes beyond sight in the first sense to achieve insight.
I do recognize a role for (social) psychology and philoogy in studying the minds and texts of communities of scientists, but that is not the situation I had in mind when discussing the actions of a community of scientists studying their domain.
I don’t know if there are analogous activities for comparing and reconciling individual spiritual intuitions.
Blindness is not relevant to the insight in science. So I think it is not correct to compare the subjective experience of sight with the inter-subjective process of science.
I accept that that spiritual intuitions provide some people with what they understand as a different kind of insight into the human condition, perhaps a relationship to the divine. As an article on Kugel I linked earlier puts it: ‘[His] faith stems from something else, a way of seeing the world as being a small part of a larger world that includes God. “I wouldn’t call it belief,” he tells me more than once. “I would call it a way of fitting into the world.”’
I understand that some people see a different world and a different way of fitting into it than I do.
But I believe that type of insight is separate from the scientific process and knowledge.
You mean that scientists would not disagree that “This is zero” and “This is one”? This is so in every science. Scientists don’t disagree about facts. All disagreement concerns the interpretation of the facts. Of course they agree “This is zero” and “This is one”, but they easily disagree about what the numbers mean.
Yes, what I had in mind by spiritual intuition or sensus divinitatis was sense-perception straightforwardly akin to vision, hearing, etc. However, note that perception by itself is nothing. Only when interpreted, it becomes something. You may very well see a zero, but so what? What does it matter? You have to interpret it and arrive at some conlusion, such as “This is a zero and not one or some other number,” and only then it means something.
These kind of illusions mean nothing. They are closely akin to normal perception – stimulate the sense and you get a response. That’s all there is to it. They are not even as interesting as mirages. I don’t see why you brought them up.
Not heard of theology? Comparative religion?
Much debate between Christians and atheists is due to misunderstanding of the word “belief”. Even Christians themselves misunderstand it. Christianity revolves around faith, not belief, and faith is defined in the Bible (Hebrews 11:1) as confidence (NIV) or evidence (KJV). It’s undeniable direct perception, not assumption. Who doesn’t have this perception is not believing in the relevant sense.
The difference is crucial. For example, you may try to keep up all sorts of beliefs about chocolate, that it’s bad for your health, it screws up your stomach, it ruins appetite for healthy food, etc. but when you find chocolate very tasty, your sense of taste trumps all the beliefs about chocolate. There’s simply no comparison between belief and direct perception. Or you may try your best to believe that ghosts don’t exist, but when you see them at every corner, the belief is worthless.
If so, then you hopelessly exclude yourself from any chance of personally having scientific knowledge. To you scientific knowledge is the minimum common denominator of human perception. This may work for a reductionist view, but when for example ADHD becomes a prevalent diagnosis, things would change.
In my view, scientific knowledge is whatever is arrived at by flawless methodical deduction. It’s one’s own responsibility to eliminate the flaws, not anybody else’s, and it’s one’s own responsibility to do the deduction too. If you wait for someone else to do it for you, you make no scientific progress.
Thanks that clears up my question,by the way what is that single intention of the divine and how do you know?
Is the Koran scripture by your definition ?
If faith is a undeniable direct perception, then faith in God is not any more virtuous than the faith that a flame is hot. This seems contrary to the elevated regard of faith in the Bible.
“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed”
The intention of the divine is to drive home and help one realize the purpose of spirituality/religion. Which is salvation/liberation.
Now there’s a book I haven’t read yet. I’ll start next weekend with its flood story.
Yes, it would occasionally seem that faith (without evidence) is very much elevated in the Bible. It surely seems so, if you ignore what’s said just before, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” So, doubt and ignorance are always worse than faith. In my view, this passage elevates faith via sensus divinitatis over faith via ordinary empirical evidence, not faith without evidence over faith with evidence.
Many scientists find illusions very interesting for what they help us to understand about how perceptual input is processed.
I brought illusions up to see if you thought that type of illusion existed in divine inspiration: namely, that people took a text as Scripture due to sensus divinitatis but this was found to be an illusion by an analysis which proceeded outside of that sensing.
I see comparison but know of little evidence of reconciliation through those disciplines. I include all world religions when looking for evidence of reconciliation or of a process to reconcile.
But direction perception can be an illusion, at least for the senses I experience. Hence my question in a previous post asking if sensus divinitatis was subject to illusions (as defined by Wiki).
I don’t agree with that. Scientific knowledge does not result solely from deduction. (Consider underdetermination for example). And science as a whole must be a community exercise; all of its required methodology cannot be done solely by isolated individuals.
.
But I do understand better the background to some of your posts here regarding science.
Determining genres is like determining taste or colour. When you have the sense of taste or the sense of sight, you will perceive the sense-data accordingly – there obviously are tastes and there are colours. How you make sense of the data is up to your own competence. You can be misled by trivial illusions only when you lack competence. The kind of illusions that you are talking about are very easy to detect and eliminate.
Let me guess: You see no reconciliation between medieval crusaders and modern suicide bombers, and that’s the evidence from all world religions you looked at.
Theology is the same as metaphysics, only in livelier terminology, so as to invite more thorough commitment and assimilation of the system, to actually embody it, not just entertain ideas about it. This is a well-known path that many have walked. Its requirements and purpose are easy to find out for everyone who simply reads up on the topic. From outside much may remain unclear, but this is surely so with everything that you don’t know and don’t want to know. From inside everybody knows it’s systematic, thorough and complete. Like science is supposed to be.
I should have been clearer: since we are talking about divine inspiration and Scripture, I was thinking specifically of a process to agree on what texts, from all the texts of world religions, were considered divinely inspired.
I don’t think science is necessarily any of those all of the time, although of course I may be understanding the words “systematic, thorough and complete” differently than you. But science is effective at prediction, explanation, and control of the aspects of the world it deals with. It’s processes are those that make that possible.