From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Oct 23 2004 - 17:52:19 BST
DMB,
> Scott Roberts said:
> They (liberal Protestant theologies) have become epistemological
> pluralists, like Pirsig. So why do you think there is still conflict?
> ...that claim (that the world is created by an overseeing power) is taken
> on faith. Such an idea is not provable (or disprovable) by science. The
two
> venues are acknowledged by them to be separate. It seems to be you that
> wishes to claim a totalizing epistemology. ...contemporary
> (non-fundamentalist, more or less liberal) religion has no desire to
> "pervert science". It doesn't claim any authority over the areas in which
> science has authority.
>
> dmb says:
> Scott, I really don't think epistemological pluralism can be equated to
the
> kind of "separate venues" appraoch you've described here. Your approach is
> the problem that needs to be solved, not the solution. The problem is
having
> to accept "X" on faith. Epistemolgical pluralism does not insist that
> spiritual matters be subjected to the procedures used in physics, but the
> demand that we base our beleifs on experience and evidence in never
> suspended. It does NOT allow us to accept beliefs for which there is not
> evidence, it only expands the idea of what counts as evidence. This is how
> Pirsig can accept the empircal validity of religious, mystical experience
> but still reject faith so emphatically and explicitly.
>
> Why should science and religion be walled off from each other when there
is
> only one world?
>
> That's the problem.
>
> That's the conflict.
>
> These two domains should in fact be complimenting and supporting each
other
> in a unified vision of reality. Instead, they depict starkly different
> worlds, which tends to make people a little bonkers, a little fractured.
[Scott:] I see three issues here. First, is Christianity, to be specific,
based on experience or not. Second, is faith compatible with
epistemological pluralism, and third, is there conflict between modern,
more or less liberal Christianity and science.
First. Christianity wouldn't have come about if it wasn't based on
religious and mystical experience. St. Paul had his experiences, and so did
many others in the early years and down through the ages. For a
contemporary Christian mystic, I recommend the books of Bernadette Roberts.
I'm not sure why you think, if you do, that mysticism within a theistic
tradition should be discounted.
Now around all that experience, traditions and superstitions developed,
some of which hardened into dogma. Included are things that are downright
nonsense. But that is true of all religions, including Buddhism. However, a
modern Christian assumes that within all that tradition are the original
experiences. In the 19th century, the process began of trimming out the
nonsense and superfluous stuff. The first Biblical critics were Protestant
believers. They learned to set aside the idea that the Bible was God's
dictation, to recognize that some books weren't by who they said they were,
that various political agendas got mixed in, and so forth. In the 20th
century Bultmann called for full-scale "demythologization". And so on. So
what is left, for modern, thinking Christians, is the religious and
mystical experience that is assumed to have started it all, and which
continues. So the faith of the modern, thinking Christian is not all that
different from the faith of the seeker who joins a Zen monastery, except
that the latter is more intensely focused. The former has just decided to
stick with the social group and tradition that he or she is familiar with.
And, to be sure, he or she may not be after Enlightenment, while the seeker
is, but there are hard-core Christian seekers as well.
Second. If you add to the meaning of "epistemological pluralism" the
requirement that everything one says be based "on experience and evidence"
(empiricism), then you would have to reject the MOQ. There is evidence, in
Pirsig's expanded empiricism, for saying value is real, but there is none,
as far as I can see, to say that value is not subjective, that value is not
something that only occurs in humans and some animals. I see no experience
or evidence that can tell me that Quality can be meaningfully applied to
the inorganic. I do think it is reasonable to assume these things (to avoid
dualism), but I haven't a clue how one could support it empirically. One
should recall that when Pirsig shows SOM to be unreasonable, he is
attacking the materialist version of SOM, which denies the reality of
value. But just showing the reality of value does not in itself imply that
a dualist or idealist version of SOM couldn't account for our experience.
Third. I agree that they shouldn't be walled off from each other, but I
don't think they are. What conflict there is (always excluding the fundies)
comes from the scientific materialists (another kind of fundie), who assume
all Christians still live in the middle ages, and from you and Pirsig who
demand anti-theism, which I believe to be based on an outdated idea of
theism. Tillich calls God "ultimate concern". For Christians, faith is
experiential: prayer is for them a high quality experience. Looking at the
night sky may make them feel God's presence, and so on. In short, faith
has, for those who have it, pragmatic value. If there is any walling off
going on, it is by people like you, Jim, and Pirsig, who apparently think
that faith in God is the same sort of thing as belief in UFO's. Now there
remains a lot of dispute within Christianity, such as belief in the
physical resurrection, or the virgin birth (the kind of thing that Bultmann
wanted to jettison), but I think over time, this sort of thing will become
unimportant, as it already has for many thinking Christians.
Nor are there different worlds. By "separate venues" I just meant separate
methodologies and activities, not separate worlds. I meant no more than the
difference between, say, doing art and doing science. Some things about
this world can be answered by science, and other things cannot. There are
Christians who are scientists, after all, and they are not bonkers on
account of that. They do not have to suppress their faith when entering the
lab, nor suppress their scientific knowledge when entering a church. While
I'm not going to claim that the words 'God' and 'Quality' are
interchangeable, there is an overlap. One reason that people have faith in
God is that traditionally, God is considered to be that which provides
meaning to life. Theism is moving in the direction for limiting itself to
such meanings, though I don't think it will ever dispense with the idea
that one can have an I-Thou relation with God and still be called theism.
But that's what people with theistic faith have. That is their experience.
To say they are deluded dupes is one way of reacting to them, a way that
walls them off.
By the way, I am not claiming that faith is necessary, or even desirable on
the intellectual level. I don't have faith, unless it is faith in Reason,
but I've read enough of those who do to see that one can have faith and not
be anti-intellectual.
- Scott
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