Religion - for Better or Worse

New Site

Hello,

Hey, I haven't written in this thing in a while, and I'm not sure if I will continue to do so.  But, for those of you interested in my thoughts, I am starting a blog: http://brianbithertheology.blogspot.com.  I will copy the first few posts onto xanga, and then quit.  I am going to do my best to keep up with this one, but we all know my track record.

Anyway, I love you all, and I read your stuff even when I don't post.  So keep it up. 

- Brian

Life Philosophy Entry #2

Those who knew me in college knew that I was a strong opponent of postmodernism.  I called myself a modernist, specifically because the idea of abandoning objective truth bothered me at some deep level.  I had this intuitive sense that postmodernism must be missing something if it believes we cannot and should not seek objective truth, and I set out to refute the arguments against modern thought before I had even heard them.  Within this last year, I have finally learned a little about postmodernism.  I have learned (for one) that it is much more than an attack on “truth” but on Western culture in general (although the Western concept of truth is, in the postmodern view, perhaps the core problem); in addition to this, I have found that many postmodern arguments are important and valid – some of which I mentioned in the last entry.  But, there have also been some significant “rebuttals” to postmodernism, and I think that they are worth mentioning.  I will try to break down the attacks against “knowing objective truth” or “knowing reality in and of itself” and then respond to them in turn.

First, postmodernists argue that we do not simply see “data” or observe experiences neutrally: we observe through the lens we bring to the situations.  Consequently, different people observe different things, and we cannot trust the “truth” of anything we observe because it simply flows from our lens.  I readily acknowledge that we understand, organize, and interpret all “knowledge” that we obtain through a particular lens, and that there may be different lenses that could lead to different conclusions.  This statement by itself does not prevent us from attaining an agreed-upon “truth”, but there are usually a couple of illogical assumptions that lie behind this claim which really do lead to the hopelessness of finding any universal “truth”.  The first is that because we draw different conclusions from similar data we can draw any conclusions from certain data.  This simply isn’t true.  Take this optical illusion for an example.  Look at it for a second and tell me what you see.

Now, depending on how you approached it, you might see either a duck or a rabbit.  But no matter how you approach it, you don’t see a caterpillar.  (I’m sure that now some of you smart-alecs are going to bend over backwards looking for a caterpillar in this picture, but none of you, when you first saw it, thought – that’s a caterpillar!)   Second, there is typically a hidden assumption that we cannot see data through anyone else’s lens.  However, I would venture to disagree with this one as well.  In the optical illusion, whether you saw the duck or the rabbit first, you immediately went back and looked for the other one when I mentioned both, and now you can see it.  My new hero, Ian Barbour, argues that there are data “on which adherents of rival paradigms can agree”.  In other words, while interpret data differently (even without thinking about it), they can still agree on some of the basic points of what the data itself (usually meaning a sense-experience, feeling, or intuition) is. 

Next, postmodernists argue that even if we can agree about the data, we cannot agree about how to interpret it.  When people develop theories or “hypotheses” about how things are, there is no way to talk them out of it because they can always come up with rationalizations or ad hoc arguments to defend their beliefs.  First, I must admit that this is true at some level: people always can find a way to defend whatever beliefs they want. 

However, now we need to distinguish between what people can do and what people must do.  Undoubtedly, if I am resolved to believe in Santa Clause, magic, or that we really landed on the moon, no one could come up with irrefutable evidence that would force me to abandon my beliefs.  But children who want to believe in Santa Clause stop doing it all of the time once enough evidence rises against him.  I would argue that the single greatest factor in determining whether or not people can agree is how intellectually virtuous people are.  If we really seek truth diligently, constantly making an effort to humbly accept when we’re wrong and empathetically listen to people, we will be able to agree on things.  But, you ask, what if rationalization isn’t intentional?  What if you really believe in a theory?  If your belief is strong enough, are a couple of ad hoc (on the spot) defenses so ridiculous?  No, but to refer to Barbour again, “Paradigms are resistant to falsification by data, but data does cumulatively affect the acceptability of a paradigm.”  An intellectual virtuous person will eventually be affected by a constant flow of rationalizations trying to support a weak hypothesis.

Finally postmodernists argue that we cannot avoid our presuppositions.  If we talk about “proving”, “falsifying” or “deducing”, etc. – we are using a certain kind of logic, which is itself a set of assumptions.  And there is no way to defend an attack on logic itself, without using logic.  So, our choice of what “logic” we consider valid (or our paradigm choice) is completely arbitrary (or, if not, driven by our desires).  This is the most challenging argument to refute because it by nature avoids all forms of refutation.  It is true that all forms of logic are “assumed,” and so unfortunately we cannot mount a rebuttal to this claim without using logic.  Many people have tried; for example, Alvin Plantinga uses an approach where he shows that this position is self-contradictory.  However, the wise postmodern replies, “What’s wrong with being self-contradictory?”  And so, there is no way to “beat” this argument, but we have to think carefully about what that means.  Part of the problem is that it has the elements of a self-defeating trap.

Let me expand upon what I mean by a self-defeating trap.  If a ten-year-old came up to you and said, “My daddy is tougher than your daddy, and you can’t argue against me because you would use words, which are completely meaningless,” then you’re stuck.  You could not, in fact, argue that your daddy was tougher than his daddy.  Though this argument is inherently flawed and seemingly ridiculous, what argument could you mount against the ten-year-old?  Everything you would say uses words, giving him the victory.  So we see that he wins not because his father is in fact tougher, but because he has put you in a rhetorical trap.  I would love to say that the postmodern critique of logic is just another rhetorical trap, which we can completely dismiss, but that would not be fair.  Unfortunately, we do run into real world situations where the problem comes down to assumptions about logic itself.  We need to keep in mind the trap of the situation, but we also need to consider the real problem: two scientists, in discussing quantum physics, may fiercely and eternally debate because they have different fundamental beliefs about causality (this in fact happened between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr).  Two religious believers may endlessly debate about whether God can do anything – including making a round square; two bums on the street (a.k.a. philosophers) may have different takes on whether the world is trustworthy or cruel.  And so, does this mean that all truth is relative?  Is it hopeless and pointless to seek any kind of knowledge at all?

The key thing to remember about self-defeating traps is that while they are unbeatable, they also cannot beat anything.  If I want to make a logical argument, I must recognize that I am assuming that my logic is valid, but the postmodern critique against my logic is also making that same assumption.  As we concluded with Cartesian skepticism, there are some things that we simply cannot have absolute certainty about; however, this does not leave us without any knowledge.  What it does do is show us that we come to the table with certain beliefs – presuppositions, if you will.  No matter whether we are postmodern or modern, we cannot avoid using these presuppositions.  The question is simply what attitude are we going to have toward them.  Modernists trusted them completely; postmodernists don’t trust them at all.  In the next entry, I would like to propose a third alternative, which includes my final and greatest critique of postmodern relativism. 

Life Philosophy Entry #1

I cannot help myself; my mind is cursed.  Whenever I hear someone teach something – whether it’s a speaker giving a statistic, a scientist telling us how the universe works, or a preacher explaining what God thinks – my immediate reaction is to question how he or she got the information.  I cannot simply accept it as “true”.  Similarly, whenever I hear people draw conclusions about God, morals, psychology, politics, etc., I notice that those conclusions hopelessly depend on whatever assumptions the people had to begin with – most of the time, assumptions that have never been evaluated.  Consequently, I cannot start any discussion about my own beliefs without first considering how we as humans can have any knowledge at all.  This is the field of epistemology.  So before I can tell you what I believe about God, humans, religion, or morals, I must first ask the epistemological questions: “(1) How does one go about evaluating the truth of a belief?  (2) At what point can one comfortably maintain that a belief is true?  (3) Is there a single method that can be used to determine the truth of any kind of belief?”  Unless we answer these questions, we will never find answers to our questions, we will never know quite what we’re looking for or how much evidence we need, and we will never move beyond the beliefs we began with.  Because epistemology is such a challenging issue, many philosophers love to play games with it.  They will ask, “But how do you know that?” to every question you ask, or they will play language games to make you feel like you can’t know anything.  But there have been several notable philosophers who have tried to answer these questions, and their answers have shaped society and culture.  The first person who deserves honorable mention in this regard is Renee Descartes. 

In his classic Meditations, Descartes took a clear epistemological stance.  He answered each of these three questions, arguing (1) that we evaluate the truth of a belief by trying to think of any possible scenario in which our belief may be wrong; (2) that we can comfortably maintain a belief either when we conclude that there is no possible way to doubt it or when we can deduce it from something else that couldn't’t possibly be wrong; and (3) that our method should be to start with indubitable beliefs (beliefs that cannot be doubted), and from there build our beliefs about everything else.  This epistemological stance has been since called foundationalism.  In addition to presenting the method, Descartes tried to argue for the truth of certain beliefs with it: he argued that each person can know with absolute certainty that he or she exists and that a Perfect Being (God) exists.  From these beliefs, he deduced many others that are essential to function in life.

Descartes has been critiqued over and over again for hundreds of years.  Initially, people disagreed with his argument that a Perfect Being exists but unconsciously accepted his method and spent a lot of time trying to find what we can know with certainty.  People discussed whether we can trust intuition, the senses, logic, etc.  But the forecast was not good: it quickly became clear that there was very little that couldn't’t be doubted by brilliant and ruthless intellectuals like David Hume.  While this left some faithful philosophers (and some annoying teenagers) believing next to nothing, the practical thinkers in society (a.k.a. the scientists) realized that we still had to believe something in order to survive, and so they developed a second epistemological position: the scientific method. 

Many people contributed to the scientific method, but for our purposes the most important figure to discuss in regards to it is a man named Karl Popper.  Popper acknowledged that there may be no way that we can intrinsically see whether or not a belief is true, but we can recognize when one is false by testing it empirically.  So, for example, if I say, “All cats meow,” Popper would say that I can believe that claim until I find a cat that does not meow, and then I must abandon it.  And this is how science has advanced for years.  One scientist proposes a hypothesis; this hypothesis is subjected to a scientific community, filled with brilliant individuals who set out to prove the original scientist wrong; and if no one can prove it wrong, the hypothesis is accepted as “true”.  Through this method, we have developed modern medicine, created technologies, and been thrust into the technological age.  Popper would answer the epistemological questions like this: (1) we can evaluate a belief by putting it to the test and seeing whether or not it holds up; (2) we can comfortably maintain that a belief is true when it has been tested over and over again and no one proves it false; (3) the method for discovering truth is proposing hypotheses, testing them, and accepting them if they pass the test.  This framework bypassed the impossible need for “absolute certainty”, but still made it possible to evaluate whether claims were true or false.  It is often called hypo-deductivism.  It basically says that we can hold any beliefs that cannot be proven wrong.

As time passed, scientists became increasingly confident that they had found the best method for uncovering truth, as they were having so much success with technology.  People soon began to apply this method to religion, morals, and every field of life.  No one seemed to be able to reverse this movement, until Albert Einstein showed how this method failed where it started: with physics itself.  Einstein took one of the most accepted theories, Newton’s theories of physics, and showed that despite countless tests by thousands of the smartest intellectuals for hundreds of years, the theory was inadequate.  People had always made certain assumptions about space and time that prevented them from understanding how light works, and what was going on in the broader universe.  Einstein so revolutionized physics that he made a few people begin to question whether the scientific method was reliable.  One thinker, a man named Thomas Kuhn, analyzed this (and other) scientific revolutions in terms of epistemology.  He found a few key weaknesses with the scientific method. 

The first weakness Kuhn noticed had to do with data.  Kuhn observed that when a scientist (or anyone, for that matter), has a hypothesis and gathers data to see if the hypothesis is true or false, he is always looking for a certain answer from the data; he’s not just observing the data and learning everything he can from it.  So if I have a theory that good-looking people are nicer than bad-looking people, then I will be gathering data about how people look and how nice they are; but I won’t have time to study everything about them, such as how intelligent people are, how people’s home lives, or any intermediary steps that might connect looks and kindness (such as how people were treated for their looks in school).  Kuhn argued that there is no such thing as pure data, but that all data is theory-laden.  Scientists, however, seemed to be remotely aware of this as they try to minimize the amount of variables in an experiment.

However, the second argument is stronger: Kuhn argued that despite what people say, a single case of evidence does not overthrow a hypothesis.  People may always come up with some reason as to why the hypothesis did not work in that situation, instead of abandoning the hypothesis altogether.  So in my theory that good-looking people are nicer than bad-looking people, I may come across one mean good-looking person which should dismantle my theory.  But, I may rationalize, maybe she was having a bad day; maybe I only interpreted her action as mean; maybe a bad-looking person would have been even meaner in the same situation, etc.  Kuhn argued that no hypothesis stands alone, but we always have a slew of hypotheses working together in any given situation.  It’s true that when the evidence points against us, we have to change our beliefs, but we get to choose which hypothesis to abandon.  And that choice does not demand on any evidence, but on our greater paradigm of how we perceive the world.  So, Kuhn argued, all hypotheses are paradigm-laden.  Kuhn eventually concluded that there is no empirical way to test whether something is true.  All of our judgments depend on the preconceived notions we begin with, which we cannot escape.

In addition to Kuhn’s scientific critiques, the hypo-deductive model was strongly shaken by the most intelligent modern thinker, Immanuel Kant.  Although he certainly did not accepting relativism, he revealed the limitations of reason and rational thought.  He showed that we do not really have good reason to believe in space, time, causality, logic, etc. – these are structures already imprinted into our minds.  We cannot prove them or disprove them.  And so if someone (such as a Buddhist) chooses not believe in the logical law of noncontradiction, there is no way that we can use logic to show him that he is wrong. 

So the question becomes, “If reason does not guide our beliefs, then what does?”  The most common answer has come from psychology: wishful thinking.  Postmodernists argue that we aren’t really influenced by what we think is true.  Instead, what we think is true is influenced by what makes us happy.  And so they have abandoned both foundationalism and hypo-deductivism and subscribed to a new epistemological position: pragmatism.  It answers the questions like this:  (1) How does one go about evaluating the truth of a belief?  By seeing whether that belief is creating positive benefits in one’s life (is it making you happy)?  (2) At what point can one comfortably maintain that a belief is true?  Whenever it works for you.  (3) Is there a single method that can be used to determine the truth of any kind of belief?  No; it’s different for different people because different things make us happy.

Today, the epistemological outlook is very glim.  Many of the greatest intellectuals – psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers – have abandoned “truth” altogether, or kept the word and substituted its meaning.  They say “believe whatever you want,” and consequently, “do whatever you want.”  But, I believe that there still is hope, and I would like to attempt to propose a better epistemological system.  But I will have to save that for the next entry. 

Coming Soon to Xanga...