Luke Timothy Johnson writes on keeping the “exoteric” (legal, moral, ritual) and “esoteric” (mystical, devotional) aspects of religion together. Both, he says, are necessary for the religious life to flourish, but western monotheisms–Islam and Christianity particularly–have become too focused on the exoteric.
Month: March 2010
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“Reason” vs. reasons
I want to zero in further on one small part of the John Polkinghorne interview excerpted below:
I think that the fundamental question about something, whether science or religion, is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we know beforehand what is reasonable, or what shape rationality has. The better question is, “What makes you think that might be the case?” If you are going to propose something surprising and counterintuitive to me, then you need to produce evidence, something to persuade me that that might be the case, perhaps experiments. That is motivated belief.
I think this is important. Too often “reason” is used as a cudgel to whack positions that are deemed “irrational.” But reason, in this abstract sense, is pretty hard to pin down. How can we say a priori what counts as “reasonable”? It’s hard to see how we can, at least with any great specificity.
A more promising route is to look for reasons for believing something. What counts as a good reason will depend largely on the subject matter and context. As Aristotle pointed out, it’s foolish to expect the same kind of proof in ethics as you would in mathematics.
Much contemporary Christian theology has criticized “Enlightenment reason,” sometimes excessively. But there is a legitimate point to be made. I think if you take, for example, Descartes’ criteria of absolute certainty (or indubitability) as something that any belief must meet to count as knowledge, you’re going to end up drawing the circle of knowledge very narrowly. That’s because he takes a criteria that may be appropriate to one subject area (mathematics, say) and tries to make it the foundation of all knowledge.
But repudiating a one-size-fits-all account of knowledge doesn’t mean that we can’t offer reasons for accepting particular religious truth-claims. Rejecting Cartesian foundationalism doesn’t imply that all bets are off epistemically speaking. In making the case for Christianity, for example, you could make an appeal to a variety of reasons: historical plausibility, logical consistency, moral attractiveness, experiential confirmation, etc. You’re never going to get to an air-tight, irrefutable case, but you’re also not going to be left with a sheer leap of faith. This is the zone in which most of our believing–including that with the most existential import–takes place. There’s no particular reason to demand that religion meet a bar of certainty that we wouldn’t expect in other areas of life.
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Proof vs. “motivated belief”
I liked this interview with physicist/Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. In particular, his distinction between proving a belief and having a belief that is well motivated is worth highlighting:
Is it important to be able to prove the existence of God?
Well, I don’t think it’s possible to prove the existence of God. There are many things I don’t think you can prove in an absolutely cast-iron, logical way. You can prove that two plus two equals four; you can’t prove the foolishness or falseness of ridiculous assumptions. I could maintain that the whole world came into existence five minutes ago and that our memories of the past were created at that moment. I don’t think you could defeat me in logical argument about that, though we all know that would be an absurd thing to say. So proof, cast-iron proof, is pretty limited and not actually a very interesting category of things. I believe in quarks and gluons and electrons. I believe that’s the most intelligible, economic, persuasive interpretation of a whole swath of physical phenomena, but I don’t think I’ve proved their existence in the two plus two equals four sense — just as I can’t prove the existence of God. What we need, I think, is beliefs that are sufficiently well-motivated for us to feel that we can commit our lives to them, knowing that they may be false, but believing that they are the best explanation. I’m very sold on motivated belief but I am not sold on knowledge through proofs either in science or religion, or anything in between.
What is motivated belief?
I call myself a bottom-up thinker. I try to move from experience to understanding, to look at experiences, which may be our own experiences or accounts of others; in fact, in the religious case, they are very extensively accounts of experiences other people have had which we believe are being truly described to us and which support particular beliefs we are seeking to embrace. It means that we don’t just sit and dream things up out of our heads. It’s very important that we deliver ourselves from fantasy. You see, I think that the fundamental question about something, whether science or religion, is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we know beforehand what is reasonable, or what shape rationality has. The better question is, “What makes you think that might be the case?” If you are going to propose something surprising and counterintuitive to me, then you need to produce evidence, something to persuade me that that might be the case, perhaps experiments. That is motivated belief. It contrasts with top-down thinking. Top-down thinkers have certain big ideas, clear and general ideas, which, if you grasp, they have the key to understanding everything. I think it’s the other way around. I think you should start at the bottom and the ideas will grow out of experience rather than being imposed upon it.
Except for a brief period when I was convinced by a version of the ontological argument, I’ve never thought that God’s existence can be proved. But, as Polkinghorne says, that doesn’t leave us in the realm of pure fideism. The universe as we experience it is, as philosopher John Hick says, “religiously ambiguous.” That is, there are facts and experiences that incline us to a religious (and specifically theistic) interpretation of our experinece, and there are others that point toward an a-theistic interpretation. No one has provided a knock-down argument or piece of evidence that one of these must rationally be preferred to the other. Plus, different people may give different weight to various pieces of experience in forming their beliefs. Religious experience, for example, is undoubtedly a widespread phenomenon, but it’s far from obvious what it shows or how much weight we should put on it. The same goes for moral, aesthetic, and other forms of experience that seem to point beyond a clockwork, materialist world. On balance, I’m persuaded that these experiences provide insight into a genuine transcendent reality and that a broadly theistic worldview provides the best available way of conceptualizing that reality. But I can’t claim that this interpretation forces itself on all rational observers.
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American exceptionalism rightly understood?
Damon Linker, who I think it’s fair to say, represents a liberalism informed by E.J. Dionne’s three conservative insights, defends a qualified version of American “exceptionalism.” It’s foolish, Linker says, to pretend that the U.S. is a uniquely virtuous nation; our history of barbarism toward indigenous Americans and black slaves and our mischief-making abroad should be enough to disabuse us of that notion. Still, Linker thinks there is a sense in which our country can be seen as exceptional:
In what sense, then, is America exceptional? In the sense that we believe, in part for religious reasons, but also out of humanistic principle, that the benefits of political liberalism, which our nation achieved first in human history, can and should be enjoyed by every country, and by every person in every country, in the world. This conviction—an almost missionary compulsion to champion liberal-democratic self-government—is what most makes America exceptional. It is the core of our civil religion—and the goal that ought to guide our actions in the world.
By “political liberalism” Linker doesn’t mean a narrowly liberal agendy, but liberalism broadly understood as the ideological underpinning of our whole form of government:
Liberalism in this sense is a form of government—one in which political rule is mediated by a series of institutions that seek to limit the powers of the state and maximize individual freedom: constitutional government, an independent judiciary, multiparty elections, universal suffrage, a free press, civilian control of the military and police, a large middle class, a developed consumer economy, and rights to free assembly and worship.
This is the liberalism that unites most of the Left and much of the Right in this country. The outliers tend to be conservatives who reject a secular government and leftists who reject the market economy (however qualified) and “bourgeois” democracy. These folks represent a distinctly minority view in American politics.
There are two criticisms one could make of Linker’s argument. The first would be to argue that liberalism as he defines it is actually a bad thing, not a good one. This is what the aforementioned Rightists and Leftists would say. It’s a critique also sometimes voiced by some of our most respected and influential contemporary schools of theology. Postliberalism, Radical Orthodoxy, and other schools of theological thought are highly critical of liberalism and view it more as the source of our contemporary woes than something to be celbrated and exported.
The second criticism would be that, even if liberalism is good for us, it’s not necessarily a universal good that the U.S. should undertake to spread abroad, whether by “hard” or “soft” means. This view would be shared by non-interventionists on the Right and the Left, as well as certain “realists” who deplore idealism in foreign policy or deny that it can effectively guide a nation’s behavior.
Personally, I find the second criticism more persuasive than the first. Reactionary, radical, and theological critics of liberalism can score some points about its excesses, but I’ve yet to see any of them provide a persuasive, appealing, and feasible alternative to it.
The second criticism has more bite, primarily, I think, because Linker, for all his Niebuhrian/Lincolnian realism, seems to underestimate the extent to which laudable ideals can be used to mask and justify unjust policies. A lot of “liberal hawks” jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon in part because the Bush administration used high-flown idealistic rhetoric to justify the war. Moreover, it’s not clear to me that he fully appreciates the contingency of the conditions that might be required for liberalism to flourish. Even confining ourselves to “soft” power, it’s not obvious how one can transplant liberal institutions, habits, and values to soil where they weren’t previously flourishing. And, as Dionne’s conservative would remind us, the delicate web of social habit and custom can be easily torn by even well-meaning attempts to improve it.
Linker says that we need “intelligence and sobriety about how best to affect liberal change in divergent places at different historical moments” and that a “proper response to [America’s] failures is redoubled resolution to do better, to be smarter, to choose more efficacious means, in the future.” Which is surely true, but the call to “do better” doesn’t tell us how to do it. Doesn’t the fact that idealistic crusades have gone wrong so many times before may indicate that there’s a more systematic problem at work here? In fact, to suggest that all we need is intelligence, sobriety, and resolve may simply perpetuate the politics of the will that characterized the worst misdeeds of our past.
I’m not sure my disagreement with Linker is really that severe. I don’t doubt that a foreign policy that is sincerely committed to spreading liberal values and also constrained by a realistic assessment of means is preferable to the likely alternatives. But the ever-present danger is that idealistic language will be used to mask brutality, self-interest, and injustice.
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A cure for Roman fever?
At the risk of seeming un-ecumenical, don’t the ongoing revelations of child abuse in the Catholic Church and the alleged complicity of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict seem like kind of a big deal? First and foremost, of course, it’s a big deal for the victims of abuse and their families. But doesn’t it also highlight the lack of transparency and accountability that are intrinsic to the way the hierarchy functions? This is, after all, a model of the church that is often held up as one for wayward Protestants to follow (not least by some “postliberal” Protestants). And yet the idea of an authoritative magisterium standing as a bulwark against decadent liberal secularism isn’t looking so appealing right now. I haven’t seen much discussion of this in the theo-blogosphere–at least the corners of it that I frequent–but it would be interesting to learn what others think.
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Defining conservatism down
E.J. Dionne contrasts angry, pseudo-populist Tea Party-style conservatism with a more humane conservatism that “seeks to preserve the best of what we have.” He recognizes that he may be defining conservatism as little more than a corrective to progressivism rather than a free-standing ideology in its own right, but he maintains that Burkean-Kirkian conservatism is primarily about providing cautionary advice to over-zealous reformers, rather than opposing reform per se.
At a philosophical level, Dionne may have a point. If conservatism is primarily a set of warnings against overreaching, then it isn’t a political agenda itself so much as a set of constraints on any positive agenda. Any sane liberalism will take note of the fact that policies can have unintended consequences, that ingrained social habits can’t simply be pulled up by the roots without sacrificing certain values, and that it’s not within the power of government to radically change human nature, as Marxists may have imagined.
But Dionne also surely knows that American conservatism has never been limited to this modest version. Since at least the post-World War II era, conservatism has had a positive agenda of dismantling, or at least radically limiting, the welfare and regulatory state; expanding the national security and military apparatus; and defending “traditional” values against all comers. The relation between this movement and conservatism as Dionne describes it has been tenuous at best. The benign, avuncular conservatism Dionne praises has largely been confined to a handful of intellectuals and writers. Tea Partyism isn’t a radical break with the substance of American conservatism, so much as a particularly unattractive face of it.
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The gift of self-forgetfulness
Blog-friend Jeremy, formerly of The Kibitzer, Eating Words, and other sundry ventures, is blogging again at Don’t Be Hasty. Today he has a great post on the Lutheran understanding of sin as being “curved in” on oneself. This understanding of the human condition–and the corresponding understanding of justification by faith–is a big part of what attracted me to the Lutheran tradition.
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Stewart Udall, R.I.P.
Stewart Udall, who was Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died this weekend. I didn’t really know anything about him before reading this obituary in today’s WaPo, but his accomplishments as head of Interior were impressive. I was more struck, though, by some of the language he used. It’s hard to imagine many government officials today writing something like this:
“If in our haste to ‘progress,’ the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America,” Udall wrote. “We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.”
It’s almost as if he didn’t think increasing GDP was the most important thing in the world!
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House passes health-care reform
NYT story here. Even the high-level summary of the GOP’s objections can’t make them sound coherent:
Republicans said the plan would saddle the nation with unaffordable levels of debt, leave states with expensive new obligations, weaken Medicare and give the government a huge new role in the health care system.
Keep the gummint out of my gummint health care!
A Thinking Reed 