Truth and Consequences

Eccehomo1

My latest response to Sam Harris:

Dear Sam,

Thank you very much for your latest post. It was clarifying for me – and forced me to think hard about how to respond. I even communicated with my Imaginary Friend about it. You raise a blizzard of points, but there is one above all that needs to be addressed, because it cuts to the chase, and shows, I think, that we are closer than might appear.

Your fundamental point is the following, it seems to me. I can say that the revelation I have embraced is true, but because it cannot be proven by the robust standards of scientific empiricism, I cannot prove it to be true to your satisfaction. If I cannot prove Christiannation it to be true, in empirical fashion, then my faith must be excluded from rational discourse. In fact, if I understand you right, it must not only be excluded, it must be stigmatized. It must be ridiculed. It must end. Even if religion were to mean that everyone loved one another for ever (which, I readily concede, it obviously doesn't), that still would not be relevent for judging its truth. And the truth of a religious claim is the most fundamental thing about it. If I cannot prove this, I should shut up. As you rightly say, with self-fulfilling precision:

"You can call me 'intolerant' all you want, but that won't make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won't differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won't constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write."

I agree with all of that, except the last phrase. I believe I can offer an adequate response. It may not be adequate to you; but it is adequate to me, and to many, many others – in fact, to the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived. My response rests on an understanding of truth that is not exhausted by empiricism or materialism. I do not believe, in short, that all truth rests on scientific premises and can be 'proven' by empirical or scientific methods. I believe science is one, important, valuable and respectable mode of thinking about the whole. But there are truth questions it has not answered and cannot answer. What I found insightful about your book was your openness to this possibility. You repeat that openness in your recent posting:

"While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us."

So you allow for a space where the logic of science and of materialism does not lead us toward truth, but may even mislead us about it, and lead us away from it. This is a big concession, and it undermines the certainty of your entire case. Such an argument must rest on a notion of ultimate truth that is deeper than science, beyond science. It must rest on a notion that allows for the rational legitimacy of my faith.

It might even include an appreciation of other modes of rational discourse that are not empirical in origin or form. Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts Tcscover_37 are not true – and could never be proven true – by the scientific method that is your benchmark. There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth. Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian – and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.

Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve. But it is still logically separate from empirically verified truth, from historical truth, and even from the realm of human consciousness that includes aesthetic truth, the truths we find in contemplation of art or of nature.

My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof, you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode. The reason why you are not like some other, glibber atheists is that you recognize this. I might say that God has already been in touch with you on the matter.

But that is not the sum of your argument. You argue further that even if you concede the possibility of a legitimate form of religious truth-seeking, the content of various, competing revelations renders them dangerous. They are dangerous because they logically contradict each other. And since their claims are the most profound that we can imagine, human beings will often be compelled to fight for them. For if these profound matters are not worth fighting for, what is?

I agree that this is a central problem for religion in the world. It has always been so. it will always be so. This is not a new problem. It is arguably the oldest human debate. Whether one reads Pascal or Spinoza, Locke or Montaigne, Hobbes or Leo Strauss, the religious question always prompts a political question. I think the problem is eased – if never fully solved – by a critical move that I unpack in my book, "The Conservative Soul." That move is rooted in skepticism. Hobbes put it best, as he often did:

"For the nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is; and therefore the attributes we give him, are not to tell one another, what he is, nor to signify our opinion of his nature, but our desire to honor him with such names as we conceive most honourable amongst ourselves."

In my book, excerpted in Time Magazine here, I put it this way:

If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know – because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God.

I don't think you're far away from this. That's why you've gone on retreats, explored Buddhism, experimented with psilocybin, as I have. You see: we are closer than you might think. But you differ with me on how this translates into life. You ask legitimately: how can I, convinced of this truth, resist imposing it on others? The answer is: humility and doubt. I may believe these things, but I am aware that others may not; and I respect their own existential decision to believe something else. I respect their decision because I respect my own, and realize it is indescribable to those who have not directly experienced it. That's why I am such a dogged defender of pluralism and secularism – because I believe secularism alone does justice to the profundity of the claims of religion. The attempt to force or even rig laws to encourage others to share my faith defeats the point of my faith – which is that it is both freely chosen and definitionally dealing with matters that cannot be subject to common consensus.

And that brings me to the asymmetry of our positions. We both accept that there may well be a higher truth beyond empirical inquiry or proof. I respect your opinions in this matter, and feel informed by them. You regard my opinions as inadmissible in public debate, ludicrous, a form of lying, and irrational. Yes, you are being intolerant. More, actually. The entire point of your book is intolerance. Where I respect your position, you refuse to respect mine.

Or maybe, now that I've unpacked it, you respect my position a little more. Let me know,

God bless,

Andrew

(Painting of Jesus with Pilate by Antonio Ciseri.)

Coming To Faith

Hatchesdusk3

Emails don’t resonate any more deeply than this one:

When I first started reading your blog I was immediately touched by your open struggle to find a welcoming home within the Catholic church. For years now I have been in a faith journey and now points to my becoming a Catholic. My mind still reels at this possibility, but my heart and soul confirm the inexplicable rightness of it. By sharing your own struggles, by loving a church that often has not loved you back, you have helped me understand what a living faith requires of us if we are to live with any integrity. The Church needs us, our hopes, our doubts, our willingness to ask hard questions and not run away, to not give in to the oh-so-easy stupefaction of modernity’s worse preoccupations.

I add that one of my mentors in this journey is a gay, African American Catholic, who, like you, decided to stay within the Church and stand his ground as best he can. I still have a ways to go, but I vow that on the day of my baptism I will bear witness to the world that gay Catholics were significant shepherds who helped bring me home, at long last, after so many years of wandering.

Allawi on Plus Up

An interesting interview. Money quote:

Ayad Allawi: I’m not a military strategist, but looking at it on the surface, I think 20,000 additional troops to complement the 130,000 already there doesn’t seem to be a great boost in the troop numbers. So I don’t think it’s purely a military gesture, and I don’t think it will have a very significant effect on the military equation.

But it’s part of a multi-pronged strategy that basically will ratchet up the pressure on the Iraqi government, propose an alternative to it, and at the same time escalate the costs that Iran may have to bear if it continues to confront or challenge the United States in Iraq.

National Interest: So in your view, the troop increase is in part intended to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, could you elaborate on that?

AA: Well I think it’s clear—the role that Iran has in the Iraqi crisis. It is extremely important and significant, particularly its effect on the Shi‘a Islamist political parties.

And as much as the United States, or the Bush Administration, has objected to possibility of negotiations with Iran, the only alternative course that they have is to confront it, and to challenge it, and to raise the cost of its apparent intervention in the Iraqi crisis.

This of course creates a serious problem for the Iraqi government itself, which is to an extent anchored around the Islamist parties of the United Iraqi Alliance. On the surface it appears to be a contradiction. I mean how can the United States expect that by confronting Iran and Iraq, it is going to get the support of the UIA, which is to some extent dependent on Iranian support—ongoing support—politically and otherwise?

So it’s a way of trying to break this conundrum. Now I don’t think it’s likely to succeed because the only thing that can happen out of this strategy is basically the breakup of the United Iraqi Alliance. You are going to get possibly a new governing majority in parliament, but that would not necessarily reduce the violence or the instability inside the country.

Hugh Hewitt Syndrome

A reader writes:

That response from Hewitt is more than a little interesting for what it says about the mindset of George Bush and his dwindling band of supporters.

We get the Iraq Study Group telling us to pursue Plan B. We get most of the military, including half a dozen generals at a Senate hearing last week, telling us to pursue Plan B. We get almost every foreign policy expert in the country – including Charles Krauthammer, for goodness sake – telling us to pursue Plan B. And we had a pretty unambiguous vote for Plan B from the American public in November.

Yet Mr. Hewitt acts as if a statement by Republican senators in favor of Plan B is an act of "appeasement," close to treasonous, because General Petreus testified yesterday in favor of Plan A (meanwhile telling us the situation in Iraq is "dire").

You can reach this kind of "doesn’t compute" meltdown only by the most extreme version of subconcious filitering, ignoring all imputs other than those that yield the result you want. We all do it to some degree, but with Mr. Bush and his supporters the filtering has become almost desperate, of necessity. And when your desired outputs are so out of kilter with the available inputs, meltdowns are to be expected.

Just to play a little mind game, suppose the President had decided we needed 50,000 more troops, or 100,000 more troops, or 50,000 fewer troops. Would Mr. Hewitt have raised a hue and cry? Is there any policy that would have been criticized by Hewitt, once announced by Bush? No chance. Clearly, what Mr. Hewitt and his dwindling band care about has nothing to do with victory in Iraq or supporting our troops any other national interest. They care about something much smaller, much more personal, something that nobody else cares anything about at all.