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.
Mung,
How do you interpret the Flood story in Genesis (besides regarding it as a supernatural event)?
Did it cover the entire planet?
Did it kill all humans except for those on the Ark?
Did God create the rainbow as a reminder never to slaughter everyone again?
Mung,
I’m not asking Erik about explanations, I am asking him what exactly he is claiming. I’ve made this very clear. He understands exactly what I’m asking. For some reason he lacks the minimal courage required to clarify his claim.
The flood stories are an explanation of the event. The text is the key to the event, not the other way round. Patrick here thinks he can figure out the event without understanding the text…
As to natural versus supernatural, these terms should be defined first, then they may merit discussion. In my view, if the universe is God’s work, we are talking about something quite natural.
It should not be so odd when you understand that people make choices precisely in terms of what’s important. If you think a modern scientifically construed text is more important than a text whose value is in its tenacity, then you are missing this point.
New discoveries are exciting for many people, but to keep up the excitement, you have to keep making new discoveries. Other people see this excitement as an illusion and they find more importance in invariant truth, understanding its distinction from discoveries.
How can a modern description of an ancient event be more relevant than an ancient description? If ancient events in general are irrelevant, then both descriptions are irrelevant. But if the event is relevant, then both descriptions are relevant, even though in different ways.
Here we are not dealing with a mere description of an event, but with a myth. Myths do not simply add knowledge of past events and people, but are more thoroughly defining. Within their organic context, myths convey how the current generation relates to past events and to past generations. For example, flood myths don’t simply tell that a flood happened, but that the current generation is descended from its survivors – it’s about us as much as about them. This point would be clearer to us if it were our myth, not a foreign myth borrowed from Hebrew scriptures. To us, the myth about Noah’s flood is not in its organic context.
Somewhere post-enlightenment as literacy spread widely, people seem to have lost the ability to comprehend the value of folklore. With the loss of this comprehension, people also don’t understand the pervasive nature of ideology and how it works. Many people think science is calm impartial description of things. If it is, then isn’t it sterile, devoid of anything relevant to us humans? But more often, science is far from impartial – it is reductive and it’s important to understand this.
Erik,
You cannot reach that conclusion from anything I’ve written. I’ve been quite explicit that I am trying to understand your claims. Not the text of some “sacred” book, your actual stated claims, starting with this:
and continuing with this:
Two of the distinguishing, essential features of the biblical flood story are that it covered the entire planet and that only the people and animals on the ark survived.
I’m trying to understand what you are claiming actually happened. I’m not at this time interested in analyzing the story. It is necessary to understand your claim before it makes sense to consider what evidence you can provide to support it. To be sure I understand your claim, I’ve asked three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Please finally man up and answer these questions directly and clearly.
Patrick,
It’s so funny to witness silly under-educated (at least in the particularly relevant sphere) USAmericans arguing their lungs out with literalism as if they don’t know any other way to read…and then for one of such persons to say ‘man up’ like a puffing out of the empty chest (!). 😉
Come on, Gregory. Even you can see what’s happening here.
Patrick is simply trying to discover what Erik’s interpretation of the text is, and Erik is desperately trying to conceal it.
Why? Because Erik knows he can’t defend his interpretation. He’s embarrassed by it.
What about you? Are you brave enough to answer Patrick’s questions?
Great, Gregory, this comment proves you are capable of behaving like a civilized adult at least at times (and subject to the caveat that you felt some need to throw in a gratuitous slam about “puffing out”). But congratulations! You made a comment without having to behave like a shit-minded stalker! You’re getting better. Keep up the good work.
Mung,
How about addressing these questions?
Well, if Erik isn’t embarrassed by it, he should be.
Honestly, there’s stupid and then there’s atheist ignorance. Erik has said so much here that could potentially help you understand language and communication, including interpretation. Some people just choose foolishness. This thread has gone over 1000 posts showing that ‘skeptics’ are largely fools when it comes to ‘religious language.’ But, of course, they nevertheless insist on their intelligence, clarity and understanding 😉 What a joke!
Gregory,
I’m glad to have provided you some amusement. I find it at least as amusing to see angry, bitter posers defending intellectual cowardice.
How about this one:
In response to this I said that the text is evidence. The same way as texts are evidence for pre-Socratic philosophers for example. In response to my response you keep asking me to make sense of my claim before you get to evidence. Perhaps I should ask you to make sense of your attempts to make sense, but no, we were at an impasse already two steps before we got here.
Erik,
You’re not fooling anyone.
You’re caught between a rock and a hard place (or between Scylla and Charybdis, if you prefer a mythical reference).
Embarrass yourself by answering Patrick’s questions, or embarrass yourself by refusing.
Patrick, I’d give this quest up. One exhibiting the self-protectiveness Erik is manifesting with his (really amazingly) evasive responses can’t be argued or pleaded or wheedled out of it. It’s hopeless.
It’s all in Anna Freud.
How about you retract your assertion that I made a false claim about you unless and until you support your assertion with actual evidence?
I’m not saying you’re dishonest. I’m only saying that you have repeatedly been given an opportunity to demonstrate your honestly and have, as yet, declined to do so.
Meanwhile, your accusation against me of dishonesty, by some miracle of modern
moderationadministration failed to end up in Guano where it belonged.Not that I’m accusing the
moderatorsadmins here at TSZ of malfeasance. After all, Guano-worthy posts are de rigueur here at The Scatological Zone.Well, we’ll just have to disagree on that. 🙂
You see, my position is that God is a necessary being and as such, He is, assuming the absence of any other necessary being, The Only Natural.
Which would make the creation rather un-natural.
Do you have a link?
Erik,
Erik, I’ve read your comment above a couple of times and began to draft a reply but I ran out of enthusiasm, sorry.
Mung,
Instead of trying to change the subject, why not tell us how you interpret the Flood story?
Did it cover the entire planet?
Did it kill all humans except for those on the Ark?
Did God create the rainbow as a reminder never to slaughter everyone again?
This seems like a mistake to me. Just because science isn’t a “calm impartial description of things” (and who believes that, anyway?) doesn’t mean that is “reductive” (whatever that means). The fact that science is a human activity, biased in some respects, certainly value-laden in many (if not indeed all) respects, doesn’t mean that science is implicitly committed to “reduction”.
Where I suspect the conversation has gone wrong here is that, at a first pass, Erik wants to talk about what myths mean and the others here want to talk about whether the myths are true. On a second pass, the others want to say that “literal truth” is the only kind of truth there is, or the most important kind of truth, and Erik wants to say that there are other kinds of truth (e.g. spiritual truth).
I am puzzled, however, by Erik’s reluctance to take up my suggestion that the literal meaning of Hebrew myths is false (as literal truth) but the spiritual meaning of Hebrew myths is true (as spiritual truth).
I apologize if I gave the impression that I was trying to change the subject. That was not my intent.
Why are you asking me? Ask keiths. He’s the one who made the allegation. Is he now denying it? Moderation here at TSZ is utterly dependent upon self-moderation. Anything else is selective censorship.
Of course I have link. Do you really think I just make this shit up?
Sorry, KN, but this is completely off base, at least as far as myself and Patrick trying to interact with Erik re the Flood. Erik may or may not wish to talk about “what myths mean” — how would I know, I’m not a mind-reader and he is an abominably poor communicator — but if he does, it’s orthogonal to his actual content, which includes the two “truth value” phrases which Patrick keeps asking about, plus all the other wacko bullshit which I’ve pulled him up for (eg his statement that maybe Everest was formed by the Flood) Note, he is too cagey to actual state that those bullshit ideas are real-world true, but the very fact that he mentions them at all means he is playing the “literal true” game, not the “meaning” game.
Erik is in no way entitled to your charitable assumption of being a serious thinker who is just not being read correctly by the stupid people who say that “literal truth” is the only kind of truth. In mine and Petrushka’s cases, exactly the opposite. The Flood story has no literal truth, and we were bored twenty years ago with arguing about it — but we would be happy if any rational theist (is there such an animal? Surely there are, but maybe not around here … ) could explain their take on the “spiritual meaning” of god genociding every innocent plant, animal, baby, and mother on the planet leaving only the patriarch and the four un-named wives.
What’s the meaning?
If Erik would ever get his marshmallow-filled head out of his “”flood happened; I won’t deny it” ass, maybe he could find himself a moment or two for explaining the meaning.
It’s not like any of us would be able to stop him from talking about meaning if he wanted to. The only reasonable inference to draw from his visible behavior is that he doesn’t wish to: appears that what he really wants is to avoid any actual meaning while taking every opportunity to complain about us. And as you note, you specifically opened a possible door for him, and he refused to take you up on it.
I won’t say you’ve been taken in by conman Erik – but you do seem to be a sucker for anyone who uses nicer words than Gregory. Nicer words doesn’t mean a decent person or a competent thinker, though …
Yes, there’s a distinction between God and universe (creation), and an order of priority between the two, but in discussions with atheists all this rarely gets defined, so there’s no way to discuss it with them meaningfully. Theists can discuss their own differences quite meaningfully.
If nobody believes in the supremacy of (what they call) science over, say, the content of ancient myths, then why are the priorities of my interlocutors the way they are?
Yes, I was making a pointed statement that is easy to object to, but to call it “a mistake” requires you to interpret it from your own perspective and ignore my line of discussion with Alan.
What spiritual consequences are there in believing that you can get from falsity to truth or that to convey spiritual truth you are allowed to lie on other levels? Or, in ethical terms, are you honouring your mother and father (your entire ancestry, actually) in believing that they have communicated a falsehood to you (to the current generation)?
Now, in scientific terms, yes, you can end up with the conclusion that some of the statements in the text don’t fit “reality” and are easily termed “false” in order to concentrate on other parts of the text that you may deem relevant to “reality”, but this requires you to ignore the ethical and spiritual consequences of such a formulation of your conclusion, i.e. such a formulation requires you to be reductive. On the other hand, if folkloristics is science, then there’s a reason why they don’t make any distinction between lie and truth (not in your sense anyway). Namely, such a distinction would automatically undercut the scientific impartiality in the approach to the material. Instead, there are distinctions of genres, and genres determine what kind of reality the text is about. It’s never a lie, instead it’s about “its own internal reality” – which is another kind of reduction, because lie is actually an oft-employed genre in our everyday life.
Erik, you are talking about fiction
Sometimes called a lie that conveys a truth. There’s nothing special about calling historical fiction folklore. Gone With The Wind has things in it that are real places and events. Religious folklore can refer to real places and events without having any real gods.
Really? Please do so now!
Absolutely right. We treat historical fiction differently than we do straight history. And everyone knows not only that we need to do this, but how to do it. However, that’s not hifalutin’ enough for Erik, who wants to make the fact that the best the Bible can be is historical fiction into some kind of a proof not only for the excellence and mysteriousness of philology but also for the existence of God.
And that’s how folklore is done too, same as historical fiction? And that’s what the Bible is?
Can you tell the difference between Herodotus’ History and Genesis? If yes, what’s the difference?
Let me wait here until I discover whether you can tell the difference between truth and falsity–something being believed to be true and it actually BEING true, and, of course, that between integrity and weaseling.
Erik,
I note you carefully cut the context of what I was responding to. Here it is again for reference:
That is simply not true and does not follow from anything I’ve written, including what you quoted. I am asking about your specific claims, not about how I or anyone else might interpret the text. I am very simply asking exactly what you mean when you claim this:
and follow up with this:
To be sure I understand your claim, I’ve asked three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Please stop with the gutless evasion and answer these questions directly and clearly. If you don’t want to do that, demonstrate enough intellectual integrity to retract your claim.
I’ve got $5 that says he won’t.
And if I lose I’ll just sell one of my Anna Freud books.
walto,
If only there were some strategy to squeeze the answers out of him. Then again, that didn’t work so well the last time it was tried.
Patrick,
Good. Let’s keep up the pressure instead of rewarding Erik’s evasiveness by dropping the issue.
He might very well continue with his evasions, but it’s entirely appropriate that he — and readers — be reminded that he is doing so.
Meanwhile, let’s see what we can deduce from Erik’s behavior.
It must be obvious to Erik that it’s obvious to us that he is avoiding our questions, and that doing so makes him appear dishonest, evasive, and weaselly.
Why would he choose to be seen that way when he could straightforwardly answer the questions instead?
He must think that answering the questions would make him appear even worse than he does already. He has such a lack of confidence in his answers that he would rather appear evasive and weaselly than risk stating his answers clearly and directly.
The same appears to be true of Mung and Gregory. It’s striking how little confidence these guys have in the defensibility of their religious beliefs.
Well, I can’t deny that it has all the benefits commonly associated with beating a deceased horse. 🙂
The fun never quits!
Glen Davidson
walto,
Erik is still twitching.
In all seriousness, what do you suggest? Should this lack of integrity be rewarded by continuing to interact with him as if he were an honest interlocutor?
I see your point here.
In the subsequent discussion Erik seems uninterested in taking up my thought that spiritual and ethical truths can be conveyed in texts written by people who knew vastly less about the empirically discoverable physical world than we do.
If one were to take up that thought, then what they say about the history and nature of the physical world is mistaken but that what they say about ethical or spiritual matters is still, in an important sense, true. On this approach, one could acknowledge the impossibility of eliminating our impulse to commit violence and the corresponding necessity to control it — which is how I’ve always understood the real meaning of the Flood myth — without any worries about geological history.
But, given that Erik insists on some degree of historical veracity in texts written by people who knew vastly less than we do about the history and nature of the physical world, I have nothing else to contribute for the time being.
It doesn’t really make sense to interact with him much, IMHO. I learned that way back on the thread about gay marriage. Maybe if you have a particular question about something in his field, but otherwise no.
Please don’t tell me that Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle isn’t true history.
But if my claim includes “The Bible has been found historically reliable,” and you are NOT asking about the Bible, then you are really onto something else than what I have been claiming. Which I knew from the beginning.
If these distinctions matter to you, then how is it that the Bible is the same category to you as Gone With The Wind?
What is “defensibility of religious beliefs” according to keiths? Reproducibility of the results by impartial observers anytime anywhere? If so, this begs the next question: Why does keiths think religion is (or should be) the same as physics?
Didn’t I ask how you can imagine this to be possible? Actually, I know how. You are able to permit mistakes and falsities in concrete matters, because you don’t hold to the concept of spirituality that actually spiritual people hold to, namely, that truth is paramount in everything, including concrete matters. For you it’s possible to tell falsities (make mistakes) in concrete things without correction while being spiritual – which happens to be against the very definition of spiritual.
If we are talking about scripture – i.e. texts for spiritual guidance, distinct from folklore, texts for ethnic and cultural cohesion across generations – then there can be no mistakes. Even folklore contains no mistakes given its purpose – if it doesn’t fulfill its purpose, it isn’t even folklore. On my view, the ancients are misinterpreted rather than mistaken.
People closer to the historical events know less about it than we do? This doesn’t fly even on empirical grounds, not to speak of rational or logical…
That pretty much spells it out. KN gets into trouble with some of the most low-brow rank atheists here for even suggesting ‘spiritual’ has content and meaning.
It is not surprising for a ‘naturalistic’ atheist (secular) Jew that KN has never really spelled out what he means by ‘spiritual’ (i.e. nothing that yet distinguishes it from fellow atheist Jew Ayn Rand’s claim that ‘spiritual’ just refers to ‘consciousness’) or what it means that he ‘believes’ in spirituality or ‘spiritual’ reading of scripture. Yet he seems to think that combining ‘spiritual with ethical’ gives him some kind of content on which to launch a coherent argument, one that makes him appear ‘atheist but spiritual’. As if it gives him a moral footing which his Jewish atheism doesn’t provide.
This is the same kind of wishy-washy-woolly communication that makes Lizzie look (now bring in Buddhism?) like a self-contradictory ‘anti-western’ philosophistic crank too (regardless of how ‘intelligent’ she may appear musically, architecturally or cogsci schizo theory). Retreat into the mind-brain then if that is your destiny, horizontal thinkers and livers. Much more is out there, but you’ve erected barriers to discover it, even within yourselves.
The main difference in my view, is that a lot of people have believed that the Bible is true and I doubt that anyone has ever believed that Gone with the Wind is literally true. And what’s important about that distinction is something you really need to come to understand someday. The primariness, the absolute fundamentality of truth and non-truth in any rational understanding of languages. (I think FMM gets this, incidentally. I look forward to your rational discussion among theists.)
Secondarily, the Bible has had spiritual significance to many more people than the novel. That is the feature that KN has been stressing, and that you have had little truck with, preferring to conflate actual truth with some non primary (absurd really) notion of “truth” as you have repeatedly done. That is not useful. It’s confused as well as obfuscatory.
This is not just in Tarski, you know. The significance of the correspondence theory can also be gleaned from Aristotle, somebody you’ve said you like. You need to like him a little more, IMO. You will never understand the first thing about language if you don’t understand the notions of reference and truth.
Taken separately, I can agree with these sentences easily, but you imply there’s a connection between:
1. A lot of people have believed that the Bible is true and I doubt that anyone has ever believed that Gone with the Wind is literally true.
and
2. The distinction of truth and non-truth is absolutely fundamental.
Does one lead to the other? Or is one derived from the other somehow?
In my view, there’s no such connection. All people may believe the Bible, Gone With The Wind, something else or none of these things, it has no impact on truth. Popular belief in truth has no bearing on what truth is.
Can you clarify what you are implying here? It looks like you are saying that Gone With The Wind has had spiritual significance to some people, even though nobody ever believed it’s literally true. If so, then what does “spiritual significance” entail?
This will get a response if/when we have a dialogue.
Erik,
You’re flailing. I do not understand exactly what you are claiming. I am asking questions to clarify your claim and thereby achieve understanding. Once you have clarified exactly what it is you are claiming, we can address whatever evidence you think you have to support that claim. Until you have clarified exactly what you mean, talking about evidence is useless.
Please finally grow a pair and answer these simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Your continued evasions reflect poorly on your character.